How To Decorate A Small Living Room

Not everyone gets to live in one of the enormous, glamorous-looking spaces so often seen in interior design magazines or on tv shows. For most of us, especially those living in big cities, small flats or apartments are increasingly the norm, and living rooms often barely have room for a sofa and an armchair or two.

That doesn’t mean you have to compromise on aesthetics though. Furnishing and decorating a small space can be an exciting challenge, and the end result can be just as pleasing as decorating a much grander room, if not more so.

This article will explore a few tips for how to make a small living room look amazing, and how to incorporate a few of this year’s top interior design trends into a more modest space.

Small Living Room Ideas

One of the best ways to make a small living room feel larger is to keep wall colours and, as far as possible, floor colours neutral. White or off-white, cream, grey or mushroom tones all work really well, as could pale blues or yellows. This helps create an impression of openness, but also give you visual space to add in a few statement pieces in brighter colours without making the room feel cluttered.

Rooms with high ceilings always look larger. So if you’re lucky enough to have a small but high-ceiling living room, find ways to maximise the effect. This can be done very effectively with long curtains, hanging them well above the windows if needs be, and by painting the walls white above the picture rail, if the room has one.

If you don’t have a high ceiling, you can still use some of these tricks to draw the eye upwards and create an impression of space. Keep the ceiling white, and find ways to place artwork higher on the walls, either by using larger pieces or by creating a gallery wall, with paintings going all the way to the ceiling.

Finally, of course, mirrors are also a perfect way to make a small space seem larger. Go for big, bold mirrors that can take up most of a wall. They’ll add loads of space and light to the room.

Small Living Room Furniture

A small sofa might seem like a good idea for a small living room, perhaps a two-seat or even a love seat. Of course, that can work, but it’s worth bearing in mind that a small sofa and an armchair or two can take up more space, and create more feeling of clutter, than a single large sofa. So, depending on how you want the room laid out, it might be worth going for one big statement piece that everyone can sit on, and freeing up as much of the rest of the floor space as possible.

If you do take this approach, a corner sofa is a great choice. First of all, it fits nicely into the corner of a room, maximising space in the middle and making the room feel larger. Secondly, though, if you have decided to have few or no additional chairs, a corner sofa makes for a more comfortable shape to sit around and talk, rather than everyone sitting in a row on one big sofa.

Whatever sofa you choose, small rooms often benefit from furniture that is lower to the ground, so consider pieces with lower backs and a naturally flatter silhouette, such as a Galloway corner sofa or, of course, the classic Chesterfield.

A final consideration with a small living room is to find ways that furniture can double-up with different purposes. A sofa bed is, of course, the perfect example of that, but so is a nice solid footstool that can also be sat on, a storage ottoman used as a coffee table, or bookshelves that incorporate a desk and workspace.