Merged living-dining spaces need an exchange of color, pattern and materials.
A remodel of a living room and dining room can be either structural or decorative. If you're not ready to tear down walls, raise ceilings and rip up floors, a style makeover could give new life to the rooms for a much more modest investment. Think about flow of activities and colors from space to space. Define multipurpose areas and find furniture to match. Determine the focal points and build a design strategy around them. Give away anything that doesn't contribute to the new look.
Instructions
1. Pare down your paint palette. Chris Choy, a San Francisco renovator, recommends sticking to three main colors--a dark, a medium and a light shade. Lots of pale linen with brown and chartreuse works well with modern decor. Choose white, dove gray and slate for minimalist design. Vanilla, apricot and teal are bright nods to Arts and Crafts and Southwestern styles. Choy adds that carrying your paint chips with you when shopping for furniture and accessories helps to limit color choices.
2. Use related patterns in similar colors to unify a mishmash of furniture and functions that share one big space. Pick up the pattern of an ethnic textile used as an area rug in handwoven sofa cushions and find a striped fabric in the same colors to recover the dining room chairs. Borrow an idea from HGTV host Kristan Cunningham who remodeled her open living-dining area on a strict budget. Cunningham used a black and white chevron rug to define the living room, black and white geometric fabric pillows on the black leather sofa, black and white photography on the walls and a black, gray and white cow skin rug under the dining table. There's plenty of color to offset the black and white, but her eclectic furnishings coexist harmoniously.
3. Change the door handles, cabinet knobs and window pulls. Put sleek brushed steel knobs on vintage and angular modern pieces to pull them them together in a shared space. Try crystal faceted door knobs, crystal pendant shade pulls and clear Lucite drawer pulls to smooth the differences between the inherited breakfront, the nineteenth century architecture and the low-key contemporary window shades. Update cabinets from here, there and everywhere to look less like a grab bag and more like thoughtful choices for an open space by synchronizing the hardware.
4. Create islands and focal points to keep the space interesting. A fireplace is built-in drama, so highlight it with a large painting by your favorite artist and hang another one on the dining room wall. Put two different area rugs in the same color palette under the seating area and the dining area. Place a glass coffee table over one and a glass dining table over the other so they can be seen. Draw attention to both with jewel-tone ceramic fruit bowls in the center of each table.
5. Edit and re-edit. Clear out more than you think you can part with to give some breathing room to the new decor. Call the charity shop for a pick-up or have a garage sale. Be brutal when it comes to the fate of that cute side table you found antiquing, the museum shop paper pendant lamp and the dust collection of your impressive college texts. Remodel by making space for the energy that comes from fresh ideas.
Tags: black white, dining room, dining table, focal points, table over