Decorate the Heart of Your Home: 5 Beautiful Themes for Your Living Room

In a home like no other, the living room is undoubtedly centred around the heart and soul of every homeowner and many families. As a space of rest, it is easily the first place many of us go to and unwind after a long day of work. But it’s more than that. The living room is also a space for us and our loved ones to engage in meaningful conversations, and heart-to-heart talks, and even enjoy entertainment together. 

As a space that your home centres around, your living room easily influences the design of other areas and rooms. And so, when you are deciding on the type of interior design or theme you’d like for your home, an easy way to get started would be through the living room. From here on, you can also decide how the aesthetics of your living room would influence other areas of your home such as your kitchen, dining area and bedrooms. 

Join us as we bring you through our list of 5 beautiful themes for your living room.

1. Minimalist and Clean

For starters, you can choose a simple design for your living room and expand it through additional furniture and decorations later on. That said, a minimalist theme is the go-to and easiest option for decorating any space. Defined through clean, neat and airy spaces, a minimalist living room creates a calming and inviting place right in the heart of your home.

In a minimalist living room, you’ll first notice how light and airy the space is. From the white walls and floors to the muted sofas and curtains, clean colours help to invite more light into your living room without the use of artificial lights. To ensure that even more light enters your living room, you may opt for floor-to-ceiling glass windows and a translucent curtain veil.

For your furniture, it is best to only select a few essential pieces. For example, apart from your sofas, add an accompanying coffee table and television console in wood accents for a slight touch of colour. To inject a bit of variety, you can also add some potted plants on your tables instead of settling for a plain surface.  

If you prefer a darker tone of minimalism, you can still play around with monochromatic features and the clean aspects of a minimalist design. Instead of using a white television console, have your television covered in a feature wall, decked out in black to create a bold statement. You can also opt for a darker shade of colour for your floors and sofas such as light grey and off-white. 

To keep your living room clutter-free, it is best to build hidden storage spaces under your television console to store unnecessary items away from sight. With this simple step, you’re able to seamlessly integrate every corner of your living room and create a clean space that is perfectly aligned with the uncluttered principle of a minimalist theme.

2. Scandinavian and Warm

If minimalism and clean lines aren’t really your thing, you can always try another direction to add more colours and warmth to your place. Using a Scandinavian design, there are many ways for you to bring in different elements of nature and neutral colours to your living room.

In a Scandinavian living room, wood should be used in essential areas of the space. From your wooden laminated floors to wooden television consoles and side tables, wood helps to elude warmth into any space, while keeping your living room functional. To also create a cosy and inviting space, ensure that other furniture such as your fan, walls, windows and grills are washed in neutral hues of whites, browns and green tones altogether.

To light up your living room, track lights in warm LED are a great option to create a welcoming mood in your home and give light to spaces where sunlight can’t reach. But to create some contrast amidst the earthy tones and furniture, you can add live plants to your tabletops, opt for a slightly contrasting rug in grey hues, and even add flowers to your shelves for softness and texture. 

While utilising wood in the majority of your living room seems like the way to go for a Scandinavian design, don’t be afraid to add contrasting furniture and colours to break the monotony of light hues, as seen in this condominium apartment. This can be in the form of darker colours for furniture, for instance, a flooring surface that contrasts the neutral tones but doesn’t come across as too jarring; or grey curtains and fans that stands out slightly from the rest of the wooden furniture.

Adding fun shapes such as flowers, circulate rugs and an egg-shaped chair helps to also create a unique space without disrupting the Scandinavian theme, and it helps you to give personality to your living room.

3. Industrial and Modern

Beyond clean lines and warm living rooms, we’re also jumping into living rooms with a more modern and sleek design appeal — industrial and modern designs help bring out elegance and coolness while adding a touch of sophistication to your living room. 

Inspired by the Industrial Revolution, an industrial living room is one that embraces and highlights architectural elements. To start, your living room should have high ceilings and an open floor plan, with industrial pipes and ductwork visible all around to bring a modern look into your space. 

Natural textiles such as a weathered leather sofa or fabric painting can be included in your living room design to create cosiness and a “lived-in” atmosphere too. Mix in a little bit of rustic theme and warmth with your track lights, along with wooden tones on your television console to complete the industrial look.

To take your industrial living a notch further, blend various materials into your wall and create a design that is truly unique to your home. For example, instead of a plain brown or muted wall, select an exposed brick wall or concrete design — it is a good opportunity for your living room to bring industrial alive and create a homely feel altogether.

Be sure to also utilise the different spectrum of browns, blacks and greys in your furniture and accent to complement your walls and ceilings. You may even want to feature a contrasting grey laminate pattern on your floor to throw in some flair.

4. Art Deco and Bold

Besides common and neutral colours for your living room, how about getting adventurous and designing your living room with bold colours and ecstatic art pieces? As a space to also show your personality, don’t be afraid to unleash that inner artist into your Art Deco-themed living room and express your creativity freely.

Start off with a bang using bold colours in different areas of your living room. For the main area, opt for chairs in aquamarine blue, and walls in shades of electric blue and sapphire. Keep your floor white or beige to help these shades of blue stand out against a neutral background. You can even add colourful pillows in vivid green and vase flowers for more colours.

But if your blue tones appear dark during low light hours, light it up by displaying ornamental pendant lights in gold accents in the middle of the space. Then, throw in pops of red in other areas of your living room such as your bookshelf and photo frames.

And if you’re a collector of art pieces, there’s no better way to flaunt them than on your walls. Colourful and whacky, bedazzle your guests with cool picture frames of hip monkeys or abstract works of art in different parts of your living room. Not only do they add colour to your space, but they show off your personality without being too disruptive to the overall theme.

Then, add lights in gold accent and orange light to further accentuate the opulence atmosphere of your living room and complete the fun artsy aesthetic altogether.

5. Vintage and Enduring

On the last stop of our list, we’re going even bolder and yes, more colourful. We’re diving straight into all things vintage and turning your living room into a tasteful time machine.

Like all things colourful, from furniture such as rugs and pillows to decorations such as display shelves and vases, Vintage is the embodiment of spice and life. Taking décor from the past, you can easily mix and match these pieces of furniture and fit them into your modern lifestyle.

Opt for hand-woven wool rugs which flaunt intricate patterns with bright colours and match them with tribal pillows which pay tribute to Native American craftwork. To blend these unique Aztec patterns seamlessly in your living room, choose a neutral wooden sofa to keep your space exciting and carefully matched with brilliant colours.

To add more character to your living room, you may even want to display a wooden antique table in front of your television, with a red and black angular vase beside your sofas. The living room is rounded out with vintage pendant light chandeliers to provide the right amount of light while adding a touch of whimsicalness to complement the overall space.

Like Vintage, you can also apply a Boho theme — another great design concept with a focus on texture and patterned rugs. As these pieces of furniture are perfect for layering on one another, they help provide your living room with a cosy sitting arrangement too. You can lay them out on your living room floor, across your sofas as throws and hang assorted wall hangings with textured patterns. These decorations should also be selected in shades of greys, browns, and greens to give an overall rustic and earthy feel.

Don’t forget to add greenery with live and potted plants to create freshness to your space and a lively aesthetic. In fact, the more plants, the better, and you can easily choose from any plant type, size or shape. 

Top 4 Living Room Designs by Swiss Interior

Join us as we bring you through our list of four unique living room designs by local design firm Swiss Interior, where we’ll talk about some of the plus points and drawbacks of the design, and also tips on how you can achieve a similar look for your own living room.

1. Compact and Cosy 

The first living room design belongs to a quaint penthouse condominium apartment. If you have sharp eyes, you might just notice that the unit has a very impressive view from the living room overlooking the shipping port area, which gives off where this unit is located at.

Utilising a mix of contrasting neutral colours as well as uncomplicated and functional fittings, the home’s relatively small living room is a simple and cosy space that invites you to relax and soak in the beautiful sights of the port as well as the Southern horizon of Singapore. Featuring a TV, sofa, carpet, coffee table, and some hidden cupboards and cabinets, the space is really as no-frills as they come, and is just like how any other living room would look like.

That being said, we like the choice of colours used for the design; a mix of light, earthy tones contrasted with a dark, bolder colour to create a sense of welcomeness to the space, and of course, to seamlessly break up the monotony of the majority light hues that envelop the rest of the home.

If your home is a relatively small one and you’re starved for space, one of the main challenges that you’ll face is how to effectively utilise the space available, so that your living room will look welcoming and spacious enough to host people, rather than appear squeezy and cramped.

One of the easiest ways to navigate this is to be smart about your furniture choices. Unless you like to live life on the edge, most living rooms would have a sofa, which will usually be the item that takes up the most space in the living room. Choose a sofa that will complement the room and not occupy too much space, and sometimes this may mean not going for your first choice of sofas. After all, you want the living room to be inviting and spacious enough for people to walk around and move in and out. The same principle can apply to other bulky living room features, such as a coffee table or a TV console.

2. Warm and Welcoming

Another living room design from Swiss Interior that we love belongs to a xx-room HDB flat in xx. 

Adopting a minimalist Scandinavian design, the living room is awash with the iconic neutral hues of white and light brown, with some pockets of light contrast coming from the slightly darker light grey tones of the sofa set and nearby dining table chairs.

If you’re going for a majority white palette for your interior, look for opportunities to introduce contrast, so that the space won’t look too white and overwhelming. This can be in the form of darker colours for furniture, or choose a flooring surface that contrasts the white but doesn’t come across as too jarring, like a simple wood laminate surface.

For lighting options, consider using warm light instead of white light, so that you can create a welcoming mood in the space. In this case, the light brown of the floor seamlessly complements the yellowish lighting of the nearby dining area, accentuating the warmth and welcoming vibe of the living room.

3. Modern and Sleek

If a warm and homely vibe isn’t really your thing, you can always go in the opposite direction for a more modern and sleek design, that conveys coolness and a depth of complexity and opulence.

Instead of pairing white with warm earthy tones like brown, go for a more monochromatic palette, using various shades of grey and black. To inject a bit of fun and variety, you can also introduce patterns and textures to areas like the walls, floor or counter/table tops, rather than having to settle for just plain surfaces.

For this home The Tapestry, we like how having the luxury of space has really allowed the homeowners to play around with the various surfaces while retaining the monochromatic and clean aspects of the design. For instance, having the TV feature wall decked out in black creates a nice bold statement, which stands out from the rest of the wall space that it sits on. You might also notice the various hidden storage spaces, which are all seamlessly integrated with the decor and away from sight, to ensure the uncluttered principle of the theme.

4. Busy and Bustling

Of course, you don’t really have to go for a Minimalist style just because it’s popular. Ultimately, go for the style that best suits not only your budget but also your personality. It’s your home after all!

One of our favourite designs from Swiss Interior belongs to an executive resale HDB flat that’s been decorated in the photo below to usher in the Christmas season. Going for a more rustic theme, this home marries wood tones with warm yellow lighting to create a welcoming mood in the living room. Complete with cute Christmas ornaments to usher in the Christmas spirit, the overall living room comes across as a very vibrant and lively space for people to gather and enjoy each other’s company.

According to Swiss Interior, doses of gold accent and orange lighting were also incorporated throughout the home so as to further accentuate the luxurious and elegant vibes of the room, which contributes to forging a wonderfully sophisticated and warm aesthetic!

Conclusion

There is no limit to how you want to design the heart of your home. But do remember to always keep in mind how you want your space to reflect your personality and desired aesthetics, along with conveying the purpose of the space you will spend the most time in.

Take a look at more interior design tips:

• 4 Unique 5-Room HDB Designs For A Truly Amazing Home
• Top 5 Kitchen Designs by Swiss Interior
• Twin Vew: A Glimpse Through A Bohemian-Styled Home
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