Kaitlin’s Living Room Intro – How We Broke Some Design “Rule…

Kaitlin Green, our wonderful photographer and good friend, had a real problem, a tragedy even – no one sat in their living room. Like ever. And it’s so cute! Nothing was “wrong” with this room, and yet no one ever used it. This is my favorite problem to solve because the reason is always simple: the room lacked a purpose, no draw, no reason to be in there. They bought this house as a fixer a few years ago, renovated it, and put their old furniture in here – the box was checked. And the living room, in particular, has sat empty of people since then. You see the family of four watched a small TV in the family room shared with the kitchen, and then they had their basement which was a bigger den/playroom for their girls. With two small kids, and two busy working parents, this room just never got the attention it needed to become the room we all knew it could be. We needed to break some rules in order to USE this room – which in my opinion is the #1 goal of any home – to create rooms that people want to and do spend time in.

Wait, What is Wrong With This Room?

As you can see it had so much potential – a beautiful floor, a huge window, and a pretty mid-century-style slatted separation wall that gave it some architectural interest. They suffered from what a lot of people do:

1. Dueling focal points – A fireplace and a huge window, but no obvious “TV” wall. And the fireplace just wasn’t grounding the room enough, it didn’t command the presence it needed to (same with mine, this makeover totally inspired me, TBH). It’s also a pass-through room, but at least the conversation area is off to the side creating a natural walkway.
2. The fear of putting a TV in their living room – I get that, but I just KNEW that they’d use the room if they had a big TV near the kitchen.
3. Not a lot of natural light – It doesn’t look like it the photos, but the window is facing north and has an overhang – the light was just flat and dead – the room either needed to be painted a color to give it some movement or they needed to add a window for natural light to bounce around.

An Empty Floating Wall (That Is The First Thing You See)

But when you walk into the house you see this wall first – BAM. Like immediately. It’s a floating wall that separates the living room from the kitchen/dining/family room. This wall needed something. It’s actually a great layout, just needed to be better utilized. They had their old sofa facing two chairs, with the fireplace behind it and a small credenza on the floating accent wall. It was fine. Nothing was offensive or “wrong,” just no one wanted to be in there.

What The Heck Do You Do To This Wall?

Here you can see the layout better – the entry is behind the slatted wall. Of course, we talked about this wall being treated differently – Accent color? Wallpaper? Mural? Built-ins? Tile? Paneling? We went through ALL of the options. But we needed to figure out the TV situation while also addressing this wall. Perhaps the answer was connected? Here were the challenges:

1. We all agreed that the fireplace was kinda boring. They wanted to tile over the brick and if so then we can’t have THREE different types of walls in here (the slatted, the accent wall, and the fireplace). I’m sure someone could make it work but it felt like a lot to me.
2. If we were to add a TV in this room then where could it go? Which rule do we break? The high and small TV over fireplace faux pas? The TV facing a huge street-facing window faux pas? The small TV next to the fireplace in a corner faux pas? The TV in front of the window faux pas? All of these are “wrong” and yet one of them is what we did.
3. We can’t really paint the white walls because there is no stopping point going into the dining room and kitchen. And honestly, they didn’t want to paint the walls – they like color, but they liked that the whole main floor flowed so well and felt so open. I agreed. Painting would break it up a lot without a natural border to do so.

So Kaitlin solved the first problem by adding a window – something that they had wanted to do for a while and once I got involved I inspired them with my manipulation skills (“we either paint the walls or we need a window”). And you know what? The window cost $1200 (including the window) and took two days, which isn’t nothing, but worth every penny (I think that’s a very good deal if you ask me).

Here you can see how much more light it brought in, moving the light around the room and therefore making it feel bigger, brighter and so much happier. (These photos were taken the day that our partner (Article) came to deliver the furniture – Kaitlin gave her furniture away to a friend). Now the culprit was the fireplace. Sure we could paint the brick, but they were up for tiling over it, which excited all of us.

The mantel could easily be removed (was installed with a cleat) and the simplicity of the floor-to-ceiling on one plane (besides the bench) made it really easy to envision. We went through all the options – Zellige? A pattern? Stack? Stagger? Mosaic? Two different colors?

In my mind, we needed to layout the living room so that the fireplace was more of a focal point (especially if they were going to invest in tiling it). You can’t put two chairs in front of it, blocking the view and basically saying “Nothing to see here, move along” which is what people did in this room. We wanted them to walk in, see this fireplace, and feel invited to sit and stay a while. Here’s a little sneak peek of the tiled fireplace:) Clé Tile gifted the most beautiful tiles and it turned out perfect.

Now that it’s all done (YAY), all I can say is that we broke a few rules, added a bunch of warmth and color, and I’m extremely pleased to say that their family has used it almost every night since – friends, kids, entertaining guys for Duck games. I’m so excited to show you how it turned out on Monday.