So it’s ok that those two chairs are faced away from the TV. The future family of this house has an additional media room so this wasn’t where multiple families were going to watch TV.
You can still have a conversation area in your TV room and in fact, this is a GREAT way to take the importance away from the TV. HOT TIP: Leather/wood + linen and fully upholstered is a winning furniture formula.Īnd yes, your chairs can have their backs to the TV. The pretty detailing on the wood arms and curved back also help make it special. Now the texture of the leather takes it from basic to more high end and special. This really helps make the space feel open and breezy. These chairs are a great medium scale but are visually light because of the open arms. It’ my favorite sofa/chair combo – the upholstered sofa with the more sculptural leather and wood armchairs. This is something specific that I’ve found I have done over and over and over, and works even in non-pass-through rooms. It was long enough to be the right scale with the sofa, but narrow so it allows space to walk and no one is getting bruised by hard corners. The winner was this Thomas Moser piece and boy is it a beaut. We did consider a couple different shape options – a cluster of smaller round tables – could be nesting or a round table with a pouf. Hard corners like the evil “rectangle” take up more space, whereas an oval usually provides the same function, but with the ability to go around it, thus creating a better “flow”. When choosing a coffee table we chose an oval shape for a reason. Ok sure, we’ve figured the sofa problem but then what do we do about the rest of the room? It still needs to be a pass-through and we didn’t want to just have a sofa against a wall, we needed a coffee table and some other chairs to create a seating area.
I’m very much considering this one as well for the mountain house. The big cozy rug is from Lulu and Georgia as well and it’s the perfect amount of ‘busy’ that hides some dirt while still feeling light and airy. It’s from Lulu and Georgia and I seriously considered it for the mountain house 95 times. It was the right scale for where we needed it to be and trust me when I say it’s one of the most comfortable sofas in which I’ve ever sat in – yet with low clean lines. In order for that sofa to make sense against the wall it needed to be deep, cozy and low – it couldn’t be this high backed, shallow, fussy settee – we needed to make sure its purpose was known – to create a seating area, anchored by this flop down-able sofa in which to watch TV. My brother even reacted saying, uh, aren’t you NOT supposed to shove a sofa against a wall, and while you aren’t supposed to in big rooms, of course in smaller spaces it’s often only what makes sense and totally works. Just floating it would be too close to the TV (as it had to be high to accommodate the indoor-outdoor fireplace which made the TV higher). Once in the space, we decided that in order to make it a pass-through room and for someone to watch TV it needed to be shoved against the wall. This way you won’t have to go through the agony we did. Now since we are here to help you learn from our experience, we came up with some very useful tips for designing a pass-through room. It just wasn’t obvious and it was driving us a little nuts. We even thought about two facing sofas, to create a cozy area and you could lay down facing the TV to watch it. In order for someone to watch tv, it obviously needed to face the TV.
The biggest problem was that the sofa had no obvious place to go. Sure we could have turned this into a dining room and boy did we consider it, but then there would be two sitting rooms next to each other ( a living room and a family room), which could have worked but we made a choice. The kids can hang out while dinner is being prepped, with the option for a TV (wired above the fireplace but here is hidden by art), and yet it is a pass-through room between the kitchen and the dining room, smack dab in the middle of the house with 3 doors that had the annoying task of ‘swinging’ which takes up even more real estate.
This room needed to function as the family hang out room – fine, easy, we know how to do that.
Welcome to the family room reveal of the Portland Project – otherwise known as the hardest room in this house to design, where we spent HOURS upon HOURS laying out, deciding on scale and location of furniture – until all of a sudden … it worked. A “pass-through room” with lots of doors is a layout nightmare for anyone, including this designer.