Living room design

The living room can be called the heart of any apartment, because in this place the whole family gathers in the evenings, they receive guests here and spend a lot of time. That is why it is so important that the atmosphere is pleasant and creates a feeling of comfort and security. There are a lot of design options for the living room - a wide variety of interior styles and a wide color palette, however, it is necessary to determine the choice of design not only from personal tastes and preferences, but also taking into account certain parameters of the room - the degree of natural light, size, etc.

Living room design styles

Styles in design There is a lot of interior, but not all of them can harmoniously fit into a city apartment, there is not enough space everywhere. From this variety, you can choose those that look the most advantageous in all cases. These "generalists" include:

• Style Minimalism. This design option is suitable for those who do not like clutter and prefer maximum functionality with a minimum of things. In this case, you will not have to think for a long time about how to diversify the interior, minimalism does not tolerate this. The color palette is restrained - the severity of the approach is emphasized by cold shades. Accents can be placed on sofa cushions, wall panels or countertops. Minimalism will look especially good in living rooms of a small area.
• Modern style. Ideal for those who prefer natural motives in their decor. It is encouraged to use concrete, iron and glass in decoration, but the main rule is to withstand asymmetry. For these purposes, you can make a multi-level floor, ceiling or walls. When choosing furniture, give preference to smooth lines without sharp corners.
• Eclectic style. Love everything original and unusual - then Eclecticism will suit you. Here there is a real scope for imagination and a minimum of restrictions. At the same time, you should be careful, because there is a fine line between sophistication, a sense of style and luridness with bad taste.
• Country Style. It will create coziness and comfort due to the abundance of natural materials. Wooden ceilings, antique wooden furniture, natural fabrics and a warm palette of colors pleasant to the eye. Country music is not a luxury, but a warm corner of tranquility with a touch of romanticism.
• Baroque style. The direct opposite of the simplicity of Country is the luxury and wealth of the Baroque style. It will suit real connoisseurs of everything beautiful and expensive. Multilayer curtains, Venetian plaster, expensive fabrics, a fireplace and noble wood - all this fully reflects the style of the aristocrats. In no case can you save on the Baroque, he does not tolerate this, so if financial opportunities are limited, it is better to stay on another option.
• Kitsch style. Creative personalities, incorrigible rebels and nihilists will fall in love with the Kitsch style. Aristocrats will sincerely consider Kitsch to be tasteless and a crime against fashion, but the poet's free soul requires colors and it is difficult to argue with something.
• Gothic style. Gothic comes from the Middle Ages, and there, as you know, the ceilings were high. This is the difficulty of reproducing the style in modern apartments - after all, a high white ceiling is the main rule. However, modern designers have learned to get out of this situation with dignity, transforming city apartments into a kind of castles by using a competent color scheme, a large number of medieval accessories and wood in the design. No bright colors - just a discreet palette.
• Hi-tech style. Recently, Hi-tech has become very popular due to its functionality, rigor and versatility. The preferred palette includes black, gray, white and some pastel shades. Furniture and appliances are selected only modern. There should be nothing superfluous and distracting attention. High-tech style is well suited for business and busy people.
• Vanguard style. To reproduce the style, apartments with large windows, wide arches and high ceilings are suitable. The avant-garde loves the contrast of colors and the complete variety in forms. Unusual elements are combined here - strict forms stand alongside complete formlessness, calm tones of walls with bright furniture and curtains - the contrast is everything in this matter.

Small living room design

One of the main tasks when working with a small living room is to visually add space, and this can be achieved by choosing the right color. Remember, light colors increase and dark colors decrease. Using this knowledge, you can visually raise low ceilings, expand narrow walls and lengthen a room. According to experts, you should not use more than five colors to create a small living room design.

Speaking about the choice of a specific color, it is worth paying special attention to:

• Monochrome. A black and white version with a careful use of other colors will significantly increase the space, but many will consider this monotony to be an echo of a boring and cold office.
• If you want something brighter, then a yellow palette would be a good choice, which will make the room warm, bright and at the same time spacious.
• If the living room windows face the south side, then it is better to choose colors from the cold range - lilac, light green and blue tones. This is a stylish and fresh solution.

Another option to add volume to a small living room is to use small furniture for refinement. A good option would be to abandon doorways that "eat up" a lot of space; it is better to replace them with something whiter, light and airy. The presence of large mirrors in the interior increases the space very well; glossy stretch ceilings are used for a similar purpose. Remember, the more light in the room, the more impressive its size looks, so if you want more space, give up heavy night curtains and opt for lightweight fabrics. And to close at night, you can install neat Roman shades.

An amazing option to increase the living room area would be redevelopment - combine it with the kitchen. For many, this becomes a real way out, although a lot of work has to be done, only one permission for redevelopment is worth it.

Large living room design

A large living room is a gift for the owners, but at the same time, you need to be able to properly dispose of space so as not to form voids, so the task is not an easy one. Ideally, it is better to entrust the creation of an interior for large living rooms to professional designers, but you can do it yourself if there is no such opportunity. As a rule, large living rooms are performed with zoning, which means that you need to think in advance which zones will be present, decide on the color palette, the direction of the style, possibly combining several at once.

There are a lot of design options for large living rooms, you need to clearly understand what you want to get in the final version. So, for example, in order to competently fill the space, you can achieve the combination of several rooms at once:

• Living room + kitchen. This is the most common option.
• Living room with library and study. But this is already something new and interesting, but there is one nuance that should be taken into account in advance. This option is more suitable for those who live alone and can afford to work in silence in the living room. If a family lives in the apartment, and even more so with children, then it is unlikely that the office will turn out to be comfortable for work.

But the big advantage of spacious living rooms is that there are no restrictions on style and color palette - whatever you like can be made into reality.

Living room design combined with kitchen

As we already said, the living room + kitchen option is the most common, but it doesn't make it any easier. If you approach the design process from the point of view of professionals, and not a simple layman, then many questions are ripening on the topic of choosing a style and color. The fact is that this often happens - something that is permissible to use in a room, prohibited for use in the kitchen. And since in our case it turns out to be a single room, you will have to work hard on zoning. On the other hand, you can maintain a single style with minor differences, it's a matter of taste.

All apartments with a similar layout can be roughly divided into two groups:

• Luxurious spacious apartments.
• Small-sized studios, where only everything you need is available.
• A small kitchen and an adjacent huge living room practically pushes the owners of such dwellings into forced redevelopment.

However, even when these two rooms are combined, there should be no pronounced boundaries, there is still zoning, only it is visual. You can divide the space nicely with:

• The bar counter is the most popular option.
• Two-tier table.
• Islet formation.
• Shaped opening.
• Partitions.
• Aquariums and living vegetation.

There are a lot of options, the main thing is that everything is harmonious.

Living room design with fireplace

A fireplace always creates an atmosphere of comfort and warmth, so many people install it at home. It is possible to install a real fireplace only in your private house, and this despite the fact that if the size of the living room allows it, since the floor must be durable, the area of ​​the room is not less than 20 m2. And in an apartment, you can only enjoy an artificial electric fireplace. Now there are a lot of different fireplaces on sale, the purpose of which is often not only to decorate the room, but also to heat it. They are very easy to care for and completely safe to use.

If you want to place a fireplace in the living room, then very often the preference is given to the classic style of the interior, where there is a lot of wood. Good compatibility with country and high-tech fireplaces. In general, a fireplace can be chosen absolutely for any style, the main thing is that it fits into the general concept in terms of material and colors.

When arranging in a living room with a fireplace, it is better to put tables and upholstered furniture in front of it, but it is better to place the TV further, as it will distract attention. Various figurines, photo frames, clocks look great on the fireplace.

Living room design with zoning

Zoning the room allows you to make the room more functional and comfortable. At the beginning, you should think carefully about which zones you need to organize. According to the advice of experts, you should not make more than four distinctions, this will help to avoid chaos and unnecessary piling up.

Zoning is done in a variety of ways:

• Sliding doors. The same lightweight as the wardrobes, the height of which reaches the ceiling. Such doors for zoning can be made of both completely transparent glass and opaque, which is a preferable option if you do not want to show the contents of the room to guests. If small children live in the apartment, then for safety reasons, you can use doors, for example, made of rice paper.
• Furniture. The bar counter is especially popular in this business if the living room borders on the kitchen. The border can be indicated by a sofa, a narrow aquarium or shelves - all this looks quite aesthetically pleasing.
• You can partition the space with screens, vintage glass and other decorative partitions.
• Another classic option for zoning a room is the use of decorative arches, work with the ceiling (each zone uses its own color, different shapes and a frame).
• The original zoning technique can be observed using podiums, curtains, wardrobes, distinctions in painting walls and using different wallpapers.

There are a huge number of options, besides, in this case, you can include a fantasy that knows no boundaries.

Design of curtains for the living room

Very little attention is paid to the choice of curtains. It is very simple to prove their importance in the interior, it is enough to remove them and feel the emptiness in the room. They can complement the image, improve it multiple times, but in the same way they can ruin everything. You can purchase a variety of accessories for the curtains that will give the image a complete look.

To begin with, it is worth saying that in any case, the curtain should be selected not only in color, but also in style that would be in harmony with the style of the living room. So, for example, a Roman blind will perfectly fit into the Country style, but it will not be the best option for Art Deco.

Choosing the color of future curtains, you can keep the reference point in different directions, but it will always be a win-win to look at the color of the furniture. Curtains and sofa upholstery of the same tone look original and harmonious. It is also convenient from the standpoint of economy, since furniture changes less often than wallpaper, the curtains will be in demand longer. However, if savings are not so important, then the color of the curtains can be matched to the color of the walls.

If the interior contains many different colors and the furniture is not monochromatic, then the largest object in the interior, or rather its color, will be a good help in choosing the color of the curtains. This could be a rug, table, wardrobe, or something else. In the most extreme case, if there is nothing to catch on, you can choose the color of the curtains according to the version of the classic color, which includes milk, white, cream, sand, etc. These curtains will look good in all cases.

When choosing curtains and their design, remember that they, like other interior items, can visually change the room. So, for example, lambrequins visually make the ceiling lower, therefore, with initially low ceilings, it is better to refuse them, but plain plain curtains will be quite appropriate. For small living rooms, curtains of light shades are suitable, such a move will visually add area. A narrow living room can be visually expanded by hanging a cornice, which will be located from one wall to another. And if you hang curtains with the image of vertical stripes on such a cornice, then the ceilings will also visually rise. If you don't want the curtains to merge into the overall picture, then pick their color a few tones lighter or darker than the walls.

Ceiling design in the living room

Despite the fact that attention is not always paid to the ceiling, he still needs a design, and one that will correspond to the general style of the room. There are a lot of design options for the ceiling, there are a lot of materials that can be used for this purpose, from stucco molding to complex structures that are implemented only by professionals.

The ceiling can be single-level or multi-level. In the first version, plaster, paint, wood, tiles, etc. are used. For multilevel structures, complex structures made of wood, drywall, stretch ceilings, etc. are used. This is not to say that single-level ceilings cannot be more boring and primitive than multi-level ceilings, since in the first case, you can perform chic stucco molding, repeating the beauty of the 18-19 centuries. And if you also set up competent lighting, then it will simply take your breath away.

However, not always and not everyone has access to such a chic beauty, since in this case the height of the ceilings plays an important role. Multilevel structures are permissible with a ceiling height of at least 2.5 meters, if the indicator is less, then you need to be more careful in choosing a design.

The color of the ceiling can be very different, there are no special rules on this score. As in other cases, harmony with the general style is important here.

When developing a ceiling design, do not forget about lighting, be sure to focus on the basic rules:

• in any case, the presence of central main lighting is required;
• spot lighting is required along the perimeter of the ceiling;
• if there is zoning in the living room, then the main lighting must be provided for each zone separately.

Living room floor

The floor in the living room should not only be beautiful, but also wear-resistant and durable. Therefore, regardless of the cost of the repair itself, it is advisable to select a high-quality and expensive floor. There are many options for material for decorating the floor, each has its own pros and cons. Let's take a look at the most popular living room floors:

• Parquet. Finishing the floor with natural material has recently become more and more popular, so parquet takes one of the leading places. Firstly, it is beautiful, and secondly, such a floor looks expensive, which speaks not only of the owner's taste, but also of his material wealth. And if the material of the parquet is oak, Karelian birch or mahogany, then the result will be above all praise. There is a wide variety of options for how parquet can be laid, about 300 types in total. The material undergoes full processing at the factory, so it only needs to be laid indoors, and no additional processing is required.
• Laminate. If finances are running out, but you really want to have a wooden floor in the living room, laminate flooring will be an excellent way out. He has a large selection of colors, textures and at the same time he can boast of excellent quality. Moreover, laminate flooring can successfully disguise itself as parquet flooring and look more expensive than its cost, but in fact it is cheaper. He does not fade under the rays of the sun, he is not afraid of women's heels, and it is a pleasure to take care of him.
• Carpet. This coverage attracts with its variety and affordability. It can be made from both natural pile and synthetic fiber, of course, their price will vary greatly, but this does not mean that synthetics are worse than natural material. In some cases, the latter may be inferior to the former. So, for example, pure wool tends to accumulate static electricity in itself, the pigment in it is not so stable and can wear off, it is harder to care for a natural coating and there is a risk of moth eating the material. Synthetics are more wear-resistant - in factories such a coating undergoes special processing, which makes the material invulnerable to sunlight, dirt and bacteria.
• Tile. Not the most common option for flooring in recent years, nevertheless, well-chosen and beautifully laid tiles will look beautiful and expensive. With its help, you can imitate natural stone, leather, wood and lay out whole patterns. Such floors can be matte and lacquered, bright and muted - the choice is truly amazing!
• Combo option. For those who cannot choose one thing, you can combine several floor coverings at once in one room. This option is especially good in living rooms where zoning is organized. But a beautifully laid carpet on a laminate or tile can also look charming.

Living room design ideas