Interior Design with Julia Luttrell
Getting rid of claustrophobic clutter
So Martha, you say that claustrophobic clutter is squeezing the life out of your living room? Your existing floor plan has an �interesting� bowling alley shape? It�s 19 feet long, yet only 11 feet wide. Hmmmm, and every bit of furniture in there is indispensable you say?
You�d like to knock out a wall. A 19-foot beam however, is expensive. Also with that wall gone, your �working� kitchen would be in full view of the living room� not always a desirable sight.
Okay, let�s start with the furniture you can�t part with:
- A large upright piano
- A sofa and matching chair
- An antique desk
- An antique chest of drawers
- A low pine cabinet with hand-painted doors
- And of course the inevitable television, sitting on a low corner cabinet.
The room itself has three entries, a window and an unfortunate wee wall that protrudes out into the room to the left of the piano, constricting the available floor space.
So, you guessed it, first we �make that wall go away!�. Bye-bye wee wall. Whew, that felt good,� now what else can we do to give us some breathing room?
Okay, instead of knocking out a long wall, let�s simply enlarge the existing entries, which is a much easier and less expensive prospect. Make one opening seven feet wide and the other one five feet wide, that should do it.
Finally we can rearrange the furniture.
What seems to be presenting the biggest problem is the antique desk. It has so many neat features; a pullout surface here, a tilt-down drawer there, a carved wooden apron running around its top edge, it is truly unique! However, crammed into the corner like that, one cannot access the doors on either side of it.
I think it wants a new home.
Here�s a creative idea. Let�s move it into the kitchen, put some decorative ceramic tile on top and turn it into a fabulous, multi-functional kitchen island!
You�ve always wanted an island, and look, now it�s a desk, now it�s an added work surface, impervious to heat and with additional storage space that any kitchen can use.
With the desk now gone, we can rearrange the remaining furnishings in the living room, to �square off� the space visually and alleviate that long, narrow, bowling alley feeling.
Let the largest piece, the piano, have a richly coloured wall all to itself. The rich colour will act as a backdrop to the dark piano, and as the only furniture on that wall, its �visual� size will be lightened.
We�ll angle the seating, the area rug and the dining table, to �visually� widen the rooms. Put a large mirror on the wall between the newly widened entries, to exaggerate this widening effect.
The chest of drawers will sit behind the sofa, to act as a �sofa table�, where we can still access it�s drawers. Now we�ll put a reading lamp on it to warm up that area.
A silk tree fills up the remaining space and its leafy warmth is repeated in the mirror on the opposite wall.
We�ll place the small pine cabinet with the hand-painted doors, beside the armchair. Let it infringe a bit into the dining space to reinforce the new �open plan� feeling. It can be an end table to the armchair and double as an extra �serving surface� to the dining room�because multi-function is our friend.
Add a few occasional tables and the rooms are complete. We�ve achieved magical multi-function and massive visual space! You can now heave a sigh of relief in a home that has room to breathe.
