Design Details: The Living Room
First post in a new 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.
When we moved into our house in 2015, the living room looked rather different than it does now. It had built in alcove cupboards and the fireplace had long been ripped out and replaced with a modern mantel and non working fireplace. The walls were pale grey and, inexplicably, the floor was carpeted in light cream, a recipe for disaster when owning either animals or children, fact that was proven when Buddy the dog vomited it on it within a month of moving in. The previous owners had one small child so I can only presume that they never allowed them access to this room as the carpet was pristine. Or that they were very well trained, unlike my own.
Anyway, over the nine years that we’ve been in this house, I’ve updated this room quite a few times. The first update was to paint the built in units teal after being heavily influenced (the story of my life) by a photograph I had saved on Pinterest. I painted over the grey walls with a neutral; I ripped up the carpet and sanded the floor, staining it a dark walnut and painted the fireplace surround and the tiled hearth.
I liked it, but this was 2017 and home interiors were rising to the fore after the boost of social media - this was when Instagram had jumped on to the design wagon and there was a plethora of genuine inspiration on the feed. There was no TikTok style, trending Reel madness; home accounts took the lead from our USA counterparts who had been there a while. Design was democratised - what we saw on our feeds was well thought out, personally styled homes that reflected the people who lived in them and it was HUGELY inspiring. I had a constant pinboard of ideas and my home was a blank canvas in which to try them all out.
