How to Redesign Your Living Room in Five Steps

Arrange your seating around a focal point, such as a fireplace.

No matter how well-designed your home, rooms start feeling stale once you've lived in them for a while. That's especially true in the living room, which typically gets lots of use -- relaxing, watching television, spending time with family and entertaining. A costly, full-scale remodel isn't necessary, and it doesn't have to take weeks or months. You can make your living room feel fresh and new with a quick, five-step redesign.

Things You'll Need

• Seating furniture
• Occasional tables
• Accent furniture
• Accessories
• Lamps
• Artwork

Instructions

1. Move everything portable -- small furniture, accessories, lamps and artwork -- out of the living room. Move large pieces of furniture to the center of the room in a random cluster; you need to eliminate all traces of the previous arrangement to see the room in a new way.

2. Pretend you're looking around your room for the first time, and find a new focal point. Select a bank of windows if the main seating area was previously grouped around the fireplace, for example. Plan a gallery wall as your focal point if your television usually dominates the room; you can tuck the television unobtrusively among the artwork. Use a large or distinguished piece of furniture as the focal point if there's no suitable architectural feature, perhaps a double bookcase or an armoire.

3. Arrange the primary conversation area around your new focal point. Start with the largest seating piece, which is usually the sofa. Place chairs, settees, ottomans or a love seat around the sofa -- close enough to create a cohesive grouping with the sofa as the anchor. Move cocktail, end and other occasional tables into place among the seating furniture.

4. Place the remaining furniture -- the pieces that aren't part of the main seating area. Place a large piece on the opposite side of the room from your focal point for balance, perhaps a console, chest, desk or a pair of chairs. Stop when the room looks right; you don't have to use it all, and you don't have to fill every wall and corner.

5. Shop the accessories, lamps and artwork you moved out of the living room as if you're browsing them in a store. Consider each item critically. Make sure each works in the room and that you'd buy it again if you really were in a store. Move the objects that pass muster back into the living room, ignoring their previous placements. Poach objects from other rooms if needed.

Tips & Warnings

• Unless your sofa is part of the focal point -- such as one tucked beneath a gallery wall -- the sofa should face the focal point. The focal point should be the dominant feature of the room.

• Turn the original focal point into a secondary area of interest. For example, if you've made the windows into the focal point instead of the fireplace, angle a pair of chairs to face each other in front of the fireplace. Place a 26- to 32-inch accent table between the chairs, and you've created a place to play games or dine in front of the fire.

References

• "The Decoration of Houses"; Alexandra Stoddard; 1997
• "Use What You Have Decorating"; Lauri Ward; 1998

Resources

• Real Simple; Living Room Makeover; Sara Bliss, et al.