These days you’re more likely to find free flowing living spaces than more smaller, closed off rooms. Open-plan living room ideas are a hallmark of contemporary homes, thanks to their ability to cater to nearly any occasion. Our homes need to be more fluid than ever before, and your choice of living room ideas play a big part in this. After all, you need to create a space that works for the whole family in a range of different situations. Eager to know how to style and layout a living dining room so it flows and functions beautifully?
Zoning with Rug
A lot of open plan living and dining rooms feel like one giant hall. Nothing apart from the sofa and dining table says that one zone is for lounging in, and one is for dining in. That’s not to say you want to make the rooms separate. After all, the whole point of an open plan space is that you can seamlessly go from one to the other. But you do want to give them their own anchor. A rug is the easiest way to do this in the living room. It’ll place an obvious border around part of the room to define it as its own zone. Depending on the size of your open plan living and dining room, you might want to put a rug under your dining table too.
Zoning with Pendant Light
In small homes, you might not have the space to lay out large area rugs to zone your open plan living and dining rooms so the pendant light above the table marks it as a true design destination. Pulling your dining table off the wall and installing a pendant light above it gives you the necessary path around the table, giving you more freedom of space.
Low Back Furniture
If you need to position the sofa with its back to the other rooms (essentially cutting off the room, so to speak) it’s crucial the sofa back is low. This will keep the space feeling as airy and open and it possibly can.
Walkable Paths Around The Space
Ideally, in any room, you want to create pathways. You place furniture in the middle of the space to essential direct traffic. It tells you (and others in the home) how to move in and around the space. With this in mind, it’s perfectly acceptable (and the best layout option, actually) to have the dining table in the middle of the room with a walkway around it. You want to be able to fully move around your table on all sides.
