Home Decor

Does Your Living Room Need More Seating?

The living room is the place in the home that people come into from work. It’s the place the children play during the day when parents are home, and it’s the place that people go to socialize with family and friends. The living room is the main communal area of the home, and it should be somewhere you can host people – as many as you want – to make those times of socializing comfortable and fun. When you move into a home, you spend time making sure that the color on the walls is perfect, that the window treatments suit the shape and the color scheme of the room and you ensure that you have the exact right amount of furniture to suit the room and not overload it. Did you decide on the number of shelves based on how many books and ornaments that you have? You probably chose to make sure that you had enough shelves and cupboards to fit every knickknack and every book that you have, so have you thought about your seating? The Home Remodeling & Renovation Guide is a great way to find inspiration for how you want more inspiration.

How many people do you think you could host in your living room for a gathering? It’s probably a lot, right? But how many of those people do you have seats for? You have been so busy making your house a home, that you probably haven’t thought about the fact that your living room needs to be comfortable for everyone who visits you and being able to offer enough seating is so important for that comfort. For most people, the best option out there is to have at least as many seats in the living room as they do in the dining room. It sounds like an easy fix; a six -seater table means at least six places to sit in the living room. If you host a dinner party full of luxury and beautiful food, it makes sense that you would want to retire your friends to the living room for coffee and after dinner mints. Making sure that each of your guests has somewhere to park themselves after the meal to enjoy their coffee is important, and I don’t include the baby chair in that equation, either!

The ideal number of seats in the living room is going to vary person to person, and it’s largely going to depend on your lifestyle. The right amount of seats that you have is going to be different from your neighbor, so you can hear ‘six seats’ and panic if you only have five – you shouldn’t. Your living room décor and arrangement of furniture is going to be different in the same way that your choice of seating is going to be different. You may not want a large sofa – perhaps you want several smaller chairs and a bean bag from www.fombag.com thrown in for good measure. You may not like the idea of wooden chairs, you may prefer large cuddle chairs instead. If you are the sort of person who only has people over to socialize once or twice a year and spend most of your time cozied up by yourself or with your little family, then it doesn’t make much sense to ensure that you have huge amounts of seating dished out in your living room. It would, however, make sense to have chairs folded in the garage ready to come out during a soiree. You should also think about the space factor. If you don’t have much space in your living room, how are you going to accommodate a lot of people anyway? You can’t! You need to avoid your living room being overly cluttered with chintzy armchairs and spindly stools to sit on. But what are your options?

Sofa, So Good

Almost everyone has a sofa in their living room; it’s a universal truth that the lounge of the home has the large, wide sofas made for communal seating. Sofas are an intelligent way to fit more seats into a room no matter the size. If your living room is a smaller one, then having one large or two smaller sofas is a smart idea. You should always aim for at least four seats in a living room, and this can easily be made up with two smaller sofas. In a typical family home, a sofa and two armchairs is the norm. If budget is a factor, you don’t have to go designer, not when there are plenty of thrift stores that are selling preloved sofas. You can also get sofas on finance, breaking the cost up so that it’s easier for you to pay them off. Starting with four seats is a good idea; you can always bring in seating from other areas of the home when you need to. I don’t think anyone would mind bringing their dining room chair through to the living room so that they can get comfortable for a game of charades.

Multi-Use Furniture? Always

Incorporating hidden seating into a living room is surprisingly easy. Ottomans are the perfect idea here, as you can fill them with magazines, books and spare cushions while using them as makeshift coffee tables. Two pieces of furniture for the price of one can save you space and it can also be a stylish way to get the seating into the room without dragging pieces in from the rest of the house. You can choose to go for nesting ottomans as well, as these can convert into more than one seating area and slide out of the way when they’re not in use. Furniture that connects, such as modular sofas, are an option for adding more seating as you can add connections later on. They also have the added bonus of looking a lot less cumbersome than other seating options.

Hidden Seating

Look at that gorgeous bay window that gazes out onto the lawn. Beautiful, right? Well, that could be the perfect way to add two or three seats into your living room. You could be desperate for extra seating but not have the floor space to manage it. Using the space in the window to create a box window seat is the perfect solution as you don’t have to add any more furniture pieces in the room. This not only stops the room from overcrowding, it allows you to bring in more people as and when you need to. Not only that, but they’re a great way to garner advantageous views of the lawns of your home. Pretty views make for a talking point: perfect for dinner parties. If you haven’t got the luxury of a bay window, look to your fireplace. Adding a seat height foot to your mantel is a great way to have a little stone bench attached to the wall for people to sit on. Obviously, you’ll be ensuring that the fire is turned off before your guests decided to take a seat – safety first and all that!

A Little Fun

So, you have used up the floor space with sofas, armchairs and smaller settees. You’ve filled the window space with a beautiful box seat and cushions. You’ve even swapped out your end tables and coffee tables for hidden ottomans and stools. You’ve pretty much taken every piece of available floor space, so why not have a little fun? Hanging chairs like these won’t be taking any of your precious floor space, as they hang directly from the ceiling. They add a little fun into the corners of the room that are otherwise unused, and they won’t be getting in the way. Guests can get a kick out of the little swing that you have inside your house, and the only thing that you have to worry about is the fighting that will happen over who gets to sit on the swinging chair!

Floor, Anyone?

As a last resort, you could have bean bags and giant floor cushions ready and waiting in the cupboards when there really is too many guests and not enough seats. It won’t happen to you very often, but it will be often enough that you will get some use out of them! Don’t worry though; during the parties that aren’t formal and have more of a casual air about them, lounging on the floor with pizzas to share can often be the preference among the guests in your home. They’re also great for the kids, too, especially when they have their friends over.

The living room is a social space and has to be comfortable. Work with the space that you have and try not to go too overboard. You don’t want to have to pick your way across your own living room because you’ve gone a little mad on furniture. It’s always fun to shop around but shop smart so that your lounge doesn’t resemble the nearest IKEA. Take your time to plan the seating in your home and you won’t have to think about it when the next dinner party is scheduled with your friends.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.