Give Your Living Room Some Breathing Room


The living room is the space in the home where you can really relax. It's where you spend time with your family, and get together after a day of responsibilities and just chill together. However, if you don’t have the biggest living room then you could be more like sardines trying to fit in a can. Not very relaxing. So, we’re going to look at how you get a bit more space in a living room, even if you can’t add any real square footage to it.

Go Contemporary
If you want your room to feel like it has more space, then you simply can’t be doing with big antique coffee tables or bulky seats with multiple levels of padding to fatten them up. Thankfully, there’s a whole style of furniture currently in fashion and widely available in stores to make it a lot easier to open up more space in the home. Choosing contemporary furniture is all about the minimalism, giving you smaller furniture and taking up less space but without looking too humble or lacking. Instead, it contributes to a sleek, finished, and modern look as you might imagine from the name. You should choose more pieces of smaller furniture as opposed to one big piece, as well. A small sofa with two chairs allows for much more arrangement space than one big sofa, meaning you can arrange them to create more walkways and fit them in corners where they might otherwise be out of the way.

Make More Use of Your Vertical Space
The number of options you have in how you arrange the furniture also depends, in large part, on how well you’re able to use the walls. For instance, you don’t want to block the heating through the living room with a big sofa. But if you want more wall space freed up, then you might buy vertical column radiators here that let you make use of a lot more horizontal space. It might be a good idea to elevate, as well. For example, to fit your storage in units that stand free from the floor, such as wall-mounted shelves instead of a big standing bookshelf.

Maintain the Illusion
The physical space of the room and the dimensions of furniture aren’t all that matter, either. How you make use of colour and light also play a big role. For instance, brighter colours, like using flowers to add a bit of springtime brightness to the home, make a space look much bigger and cleaner than darker colours. Similarly, you should think about how you light the room and, in particular, the shadows that your lighting creates. Poor furniture placement around a central light can create large shadows that dominate the room, making it feel closer and smaller. Accent lighting can help you banish those shadows, highlighting more of the space of the room. If you want a living room that still feels spacious even if you don’t have all that much space, you can compromise without having to give anything up. The right choice of furniture, better use of vertical space, and a focus on not just the reality, but the feel of space, will help you greatly.