The living room nowadays should look beautiful, cozy, and warm. To promote this, we’re going to go over eight timeless, tested, and trusted design tips for a cozy living room and make you feel comfortable.
I’ll do well to cover furniture layouts, the psychology of space and shapes, color, texture, decor, and all the interesting ideas you won’t find in those Instagram videos. It won’t hurt to stay some time on this blog post, read it to the end, and find some interesting information that can help make your home look nice.
1. A lower ceiling is better
If you want a living room that feels cozy and relaxed, then pay close attention to the ceiling height and how it makes you feel. Low ceilings, or the illusion of them at least, make a room feel a lot more intimate, warmer, and cozier.
The reason for this is that when you lower the ceiling, it makes you feel more cocooned, sheltered, and protected.
In contrast, high ceilings point towards the sky, making the room feel more awe-inspiring but emotionally distant. Thinking about it can make you feel like you’re in a cathedral or grand library.
These grand spaces have high ceilings, which makes everything feel so small and a bit insignificant, which is cool depending on the space. If you’re someone who just wants to have a cozy living room where you want to read a book, play with your cat, then the lower ceiling is best for you.
If you already have a massive house with high ceilings and you want to make your living room cozy, you can try these:
- Lower the visual focus from the ceiling
- Always hang art at eye level
- Don’t hang pendant lights too high
- Paint darker colors on the ceiling and upper portion of the wall (Helps bring down the space)
- Break up vertical space using horizontal lines, picture rails, wall moldings, etc.
- Use soft, suspended fabric canopies
It all helps guide the eye horizontally and not vertically. A room with horizontal lines and a darker ceiling looks like it has a much lower height.
2. Each Zone should be wrapped
So, imagine in your living room, you have three functional zones. You have a seating area, a dining area, and a desk.
In this scenario, we have all the furniture, but somehow it looks a bit messy, a bit cluttered, and it doesn’t feel very cozy when you’re sitting down because each of the zones doesn’t feel like its own enclosed functional space.
However, if you start to define the areas and make each zone feel like its own little enclosure, you feel so much more comfortable and cozy when you’re sitting and using that space.
The reason for this is that our brains are wired to seek shelter and safety. So, when you make a space feel like it’s enclosed and sheltered, you are able to relax a little bit more because you feel like you’re not going to get attacked by predators out of nowhere.
To make the living room feel cozy, do these:
- Make every functional zone feel enclosed
- Put a lamp above your sofa
- Place a rug under each space
- Put a tall plant in the corner
- Use pendant lights over your dining table
These are practical tips that will help make your living room functional yet cozy and comfortable. Once you see it in reality, you’ll understand why they are needed. One of the best design tips for a cozy living room, I have learned of is to set your seat in order.
3. The right seating order
It’s no longer a new thing that living rooms today are often centered around the TV, and that’s normal in this age and time. I am a TV lover, also with the quality of the TV shows they’re producing nowadays, my phone can’t show me the details.
But the thing is, TV-focused layouts usually arrange sofas in a row, which is cool for watching TV, but is not best for conversations. So, if you want your living room to be comfortable for just one or two people, that’s fine. But if you’re thinking of making it cozy for three or more people, having a socialable space, then your thought should be creating a seating circle.
If you have a sofa arrangement, maybe you can add an accent chair, a puff, or a stool in the corner so it can complete a seating circle where people can choose whether to sit opposite you or adjacent to you.
Avoid placing seating right in the path of movement or in really high-traffic areas because it does make people feel unsettled. In reality, I hate picking the seat next to the toilet or kitchen door when I visit a restaurant; you might agree with me on this.
First of all, maybe because of the smell, but also because it’s just a high-traffic area, and the feeling of people constantly coming and going is just not so relaxing.
This brings us to why you should aim at having a loose circle, something that’s flexible, not too rigid. Make the seats movable; this gives your visitor the option to move their chair easily. Nothing beats the flexibility that makes people feel relaxed. It is one of the best design tips for a cozy living room.
Read More: 8 Outdated Home Design Trends to Watch Out for and Fixes
4. Seat Mixing Works
Most modern chairs are built for an average person, but we’re different people, and we come in all different sizes. A short person and a tall person don’t sit the same way, while some perch, some sprawl.
One chair can’t match everyone or every mood, which is why having one design of chair throughout the room will feel uncomfortable to some people. Nothing beats having a living space with different chairs, as it gives you different options for all these sorts of scenarios and moods, shapes, and body sizes.
What I will always recommend is mixing different types of chairs in a space. Stools, armchairs, sofa, puffs, sectionals. Choosing a mix and matching furniture is not about making the room look stylish or cool, it is also about the comfort you can experience while sitting.
5. Warm vibes are cool
If we were to compare two living spaces and pick a cozy one, I think it’s pretty clear that the room that looks a bit warmer is also a little bit cozier and inviting. I mean, I think it’s easy to think that warm colors mean just painting your walls yellow, red, terracotta, and just saying it is cozy. But it’s not quite as simple as that.
Here is what I have discovered, and my notes:
The source of room warmth is not the color of the room but the color of the light that’s lit in the room.
Warm colored light feels cozy because light with yellow or red cools our nervous system as humans.
This warm color living room can look and feel very cozy during the day. But if you take the same room and light it up at night with bright white fluorescent light, it will feel very cold, sterile, and emotionally uncozy.
You can get a lot of rooms that are decorated in shades of gray, blue, green, you know, the cold tones that still feel very inviting and cozy.
Know this: The real source of the warmth is not the color of the room, but it’s the color of the light that fills the room.
We find rooms with warm colored light more cozy because light with red and yellow tones calms our nervous system. It makes people’s skin look healthier, food more appetizing, and the space more inviting. Cold colored light does the opposite.
To make your living room feel cozy during the day and night, make sure the overall color of the light feels warm. Prioritize yellows, oranges, reds, and warm wood in dark or north-facing rooms.
Depending on your space, choose one colored light bulb in the 2,700 to 3,000 Kelvin range, make sure to avoid anything marked cool white or above 4,000 in a space that’s not task-oriented.
For example, if you’re in a workshop or your work needs to be active, like pulling all-nighters at your desk, you should go for bright white fluorescent lights.
If it is just a living space that needs to be cozy, opt for warm colored lights.
6. Put a sign of nature
One of the best design tips for a cozy living room is nature. A roof without any signs of life, like plants, flowers, greenery, or nature, is like eating food with no salt. It feels very unalive, that’s why I openly dislike the old beige, old cream aesthetic.
It kind of portrays the image of deserts, which look very dry and sad. Looking from an evolutionary perspective, humans feel safest and most at ease in environments that support life.
You should place some fresh flowers or little plant vases on the coffee table or dining table in your living room. You can look at other surfaces in your living room, and you can also place tall plants in the corner of the space.
By now, you should know that corners are the best place to have tall plants in a space. You can also place plants on top of the shelf where you can’t touch them.
When you think about using pots, it is best to use natural warm materials like woven baskets, ceramics, and terra cotta. Stop using glossy plastics cause they will feel artificial and unnatural.
I aim to keep everything in my space, ‘staying alive’, because that is how you can beautify your space and allow nature into the space. If you can’t maintain the real plants, you can opt for artificial plants or flowers, just make sure they are placed far from where you can touch them.
7. Leave your signature
Leaving your signature is a big thing in the 21st century. If you go to social media apps like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, etc., you will find most home decor video creators always strive to create the best home decor, flashy, shining, while forgetting the details of humans.
If you are creating the room setup for personal use, then it’s best not to follow everything on Instagram or Pinterest. Don’t get me wrong, you can use them as a reference, then you incorporate yourself into the space.
Put your personal touches, items that are important to you, you are not in the home design competition, create what is important and feels good to you. But make sure to keep yourself in check with other home design standards.
The perks of making your space look like your personality include the psychological impact it will have on you. It’ll boost your confidence, make it feel cozy and personal, and will also help you perform better when it comes to completing tasks, being creative, and in other ways.
Some of the things that can help you bring your personality into your room are your pictures, a gift from someone you cherish, digital art you love, some items you love to see, etc.
8. Be flexible
Since we both know that decorating our space should never be a competition, to make your space feel cozy and personal, you must avoid being rigid.
As a human, your personality must matter in your domain for it to feel cozy. Let’s say we have a perfectly styled, pristine, symmetrical living room, which might look cool but not too cozy, but if we add some flowers, drape a blanket on the sofa, or add a stack of books in the middle, we should have that cozy look in an instant.
Perfectly styled rooms are only seen on social media platforms; they will only increase social pressure, not your room’s coziness. People feel isolated in a place where they are not permitted to make or apply any changes. So why feel like a prisoner or stranger in your own space because of social pressure? It’s your space, own it.
There is nothing wrong or bad about having some display of imperfections in your room; it makes your space human. Some examples: a chair that has been used, a rumpled blanket, a cushion slightly off the center. These little imperfections make the room feel complete and cozy.
You can display those vintage items you inherited from your parents or grandparents in your space, which will bring out that natural look in your space. The more natural items you have in your space, the more cozy your room gets, just don’t overdo it.
My words
Making your space look cozy and inviting is easy when you obey these eight design tips for a cozy living room. You don’t have to do too much, just be yourself. Make your room speak about your personality.
Those natural materials are of great importance; make sure you include them, and also embrace your imperfections, as it makes your space look sensible.
