Design Details: The Family Room
Part 5 of a midweek series where I plan to go through every room in my home to work out why the space works and explain what I've done.
This week, we are heading for the family room, located in the centre of our house and the room which has been the most difficult for me to work out how it should function. When we bought our house back in 2015, it was a revelation, space wise. We had sold an Edwardian semi in Reading but our move to York meant that house prices were, at the time, significantly lower and you could get, in summary, a lot more bang for your buck. So we did. We decided to buy a similarly priced property here to that which we had left behind in Berkshire, meaning that our money continued to be invested in property and would hopefully do okay for the next few years.
We fell in love with The Elms, our current home, firstly because it was the most beautiful that we viewed but also it had a significant amount of downstairs space, ideal for our family of five (two of whom were in Primary and one in Secondary education at the time). It had been worked on by a developer (who had not treated it too badly at all) and it was a blank canvas. Plus, on a very shallow note, it’s on a direct road straight into York (if you keep going you basically hit Fenwick) and I also liked the fact that the address was three lines long only. Yes, it’s the little things, ha.
Anyway, the space felt VAST in comparison to our previous home, comprising of three large downstairs living areas plus a smaller family room. We didn’t even nearly have enough furniture to fill the rooms and it took a lot of hard secondhand and vintage trawling (I know, I’m selfless) to furnish them. We turned what was labelled (see the floor plan below) the Family Room into a home office and the Games Room (which had a home bar by the patio doors at the end, as you can see) into a dining room/fun seating area to sit by the bar with friends etc. The Dining Room space in the centre became a living area, although I regularly swapped the dining table/seating between the two if I fancy a change of scenery (no room is static, IMO). My favourite thing about furnishing homes is being able to move things around and transform and update a space just by switching up your furniture, so as you can imagine, this was a dream floor plan for me.