Lightening Up the Living Room…Starting with the Main Focal Point, (besides the TV, that is)

The living room in “Our House” has a very main focal point, due to the actual layout of the space. It is a great-room style with the kitchen and living being totally open to each other. It has a dramatic beamed cathedral ceiling and the room’s far wall, where your eye naturally falls, upon entering the room, is a tall fireplace stone chase, symmetrically flanked by tall windows. (If you read my other posts about this set up, you’ll know that when something is arranged in a symmetrical flanking way like this, it’s like it screams, “Hey you, look at what’s in between us!”

In this case the windows are telling you to look at that huge dark gray stone fireplace. So, whatever I put in front of that wall is going to be part of that statement. Previously, I kind of played down that symmetry by having only a single, humble little rocker dressed with a French country rooster print slipcover. However, in my mood to ‘lighten up’ the room, I turned on my critical eye and realized how dark that looked, especially with the red lampshade hanging over it.

So my goal is to neutralize the colors, which offers less visual demand, and also to bring in more whites.

But let’s go back…way, way, way back to the beginning, just because it’s fun to see the stages of a room.

Wow! (It’s fun for me to see these pics and be reminded) this is what the living room looked like when we first bought the house, before we brought in any furniture. It was pretty neutral then, but ohhhhh, sooooo boring!!

Since then we replaced the carpet with wool berber, and layered on a beautiful area rug. We ripped out the ranch moulding and put in wide custom made trim. I haven’t replaced the fireplace insert yet, but I did paint those awful gold doors with black high heat paint to make it just blend in. And this picture doesn’t show the ceiling, but it was the typical 1980’s popcorn treatment., just a couple of years ago I finally was able to recover that with the gorgeous wood and beam ceiling you see in some of the after pics. (Someday I’ll post on that ceiling treatment.)

Then somewhere between that first picture and now, I’ve painted this living room a few times…both a super dark green, so dark it looked black. I liked that for a while. Then I painted it a soft khaki tan/green, I liked that for a while too. Then last year I painted it this Hirshfield’s color: ‘Brass Bucket’ (it shows up a little more gold in most of the pics than it really is) and I still like it, so I didn’t want to repaint it…yet. So working with that and the gorgeous area rug I’ve had for years, plus some of the other fabrics in here I knew I wanted to remain in the room, I figured to replace the rocker would be a good remedy.

So back to the first phase of lightening up…well I guess this isn’t exactly the first phase, is it? The first and second phase were changing out the window treatments, and re-covering the pottery barn bench that you can see here in the original red kilim weave, and the third phase was lightening up the mantel. So then, on to phase 4 of lightening up the living room: I must find a home for this rocker. A home in my home, that is. I love this chair, it’s crazy comfortable.

After much walking from room-to-room, deliberation and conversation, (yes, with myself) I found the perfect spot for it, in the seating area of the dining room.

It did entail finding a new spot for these pair of chairs, (but that wasn’t so difficult, I found the perfect spot for them, which I’ll have to share with you later or this post is going to be a book).

So I moved the two chairs to their new ‘perfect’ spot, and in came the rocker.

Once it was there, I realized how it was meant to be here all along. This area has several roosters hanging around in it already, and the black check looks stunning with the heavy black accent in the room. Yay!, now back to the living room…

Ahhhh, finally! Ta-da! This is what I replaced the rooster rocker with, these two cute French script, tufted back, armless chairs.

I love the pale linen color and muted gray lettering. I found them at Pier1 and knew they were going to be the ones.

The pillow on each of them, grounds the color scheme of browns and lights, and came from my stash of pillows, (some of which I’ve made, purchased at sales, or like these got at Pier1).

Yep, the floor lamp came from Pier1 too, it was on clearance. The gentle curve and neutral tone of the shade are lovely and not ‘jarring’ like the previous red shaded lamp.

So here you can see phase 1, 2, 3 and 4 completed, the window treatments, Pottery Barn bench re-do, mantel, and now replacing the rocker with these chairs.

It’s going to be fun taking you through the highlights of this room throughout the week…

 

 

Yay!! I’ve been featured here:

 

I’m linking up at these great parties:

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