FinishedFinished 2024

The Living Room

One good sofa, two lamps, and nothing else that isn't earning its place

Warm off-white walls: #F2EBE1
Oat linen: #DCCFBC
Faded rust: #B5654A
Walnut: #584434

The Living RoomLiving room with a linen sofa facing a wall of unframed art

This room has three windows on one wall and none on the others, so everything here is about pushing that light further into the house. The sofa sits perpendicular to the windows rather than facing them, which sounds wrong and is the reason the room works.

The hard rule was two lamps minimum. Overhead light flattens a room at night; a pair of table lamps at eye level does the opposite. I run both on dimmers with 2700K bulbs and almost never turn on the ceiling fixture.

Everything else came slowly. The rug was in the house when we bought it. The coffee table is a trunk from an estate sale. The art is mostly unframed paper, taped up, waiting for me to commit.

What changed

1Pulled brown wall-to-wall carpet, refinished the fir underneath in a matte oil.
2Skim-coated the walls to hide sixty years of patching, then painted them a warm off-white.
3Replaced the builder-grade ceiling fan with a plaster flush mount and added two table lamps.
4Swapped the heavy drapes for unlined linen on a simple iron rod, hung high and wide.

Corner of the living room with a plaster lamp and a stack of books

Vintage trunk used as a coffee table with a bud vase on top

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