Living Room

The Design Concept

The living room design was only finalised after several months of thinking and planning. We are very satisfied with the final design and the fact that we started planning several months in advance helped us as there were several iterations of the living room design. 

The old columns

The main issue with the living room is that while it is 8m long, about 2m or so of the living room near the entrance way is rather dark. In the previous design, it was a largely unused space and partitioned off with columns. Was there a way to maximise the use of this space?

The first idea we had was to put a computer corner in the unused space, with the idea that the unused space would now certainly be heavily used with computers there. After that, we scrapped the idea because a computer area would eat too much into the living room and not provide space for shoe storage at the entranceway. Instead, we decided on the hi-fi corner to be in the living room.

Proposed storage

Next, we came up with the idea of a storage partition, taking up 1-2m or so. Then we had to decide on which end of the living room were we going to put the storage partition. I drew up designs based on both ideas (the luxury of having several months of planning time) After having the time to think about it, we decided that the storage partition would be at the darker unused area. 


We also had to make a decision on the size of the storage partition and we eventually decided on a small 1m sized partition. It should be wide enough to wall mount bicycles high on the wall and for other general storage.


The partition wall was also useful from a hi-fi standpoint as it allowed the speaker cables to travel within trunking in the partition wall and also allowed for Ecophon acoustic panels to be placed inside the wall.



The Display Unit

Old display unit

The old living room display unit had an arch that spanned the whole wall and extending onto the corridor, but was not our style. Furthermore, glass, wood, and black surfaces?




Coming up with a design for the display unit was a tough one. First we identified its characteristics

• Not a TV console as no TV in the living room
• Space to display a selection nice coffee table books (eg: my Outdoor Photographer of the Year books)
•  Later in the piece, the display unit was deep enough to accommodate a projector (this required some thinking and research to satisfy myself that a large projector to screen distance was ok).
• Clean uncluttered look. Probably white in colour

Terence Conran's book How to Live in Small Spaces had examples of open shelving books with clean uncluttered looks. Then we looked at various existing systems like Polyform but nothing matched exactly like what we needed. 

This was a problem since we were designing-it-ourselves: the clock was ticking and without an ID to design the display cabinet, time was running out.

Work in progress

Looking through the various Squarerooms and Home & Decor Magazines we had was initially not helpful. The general designs for living rooms seem centred around the mounting of a TV and if you removed the TV as the central element, the design actually fell flat. We were going to have to go with something in Conran's book when we spotted something nicer in a photograph in Squarerooms. The storage unit wasn't even the focus and the photo was supposed to display sofas with stain resistant material.