5 Ways To Give Your Living Room That Modern Look

Everyone prefers different styles when it comes time to decorate a living room. About 12% of living rooms feature a modern design. Your living room needs to reflect your personal style and preferences to your guests, whether they are favored family members, important members of the workplace, or the neighbors over for a good time. Read on to learn how to decorate your living room in a way that makes it feel modern and stylish.

Keep Things Open

A room with a modern feel tends to be more open. In fact, open-concept floor plans are among the hallmarks of modern design. In a modern home’s entertaining spaces, there is a flow from the living room to the kitchen to the dining room. If your home is already an open concept, you have a great start. However, even with load-bearing walls that stand in your way, you have options open to you to open things up. Keep sofas against the walls. When large furniture crowds the middle of the space, it loses that modern appeal while visually dividing it. Use a united color scheme throughout the rooms. This includes art; use similar themes or a single series in your floor plan that is partially open to further unite the spaces.

Cut Out Clutter

Modern is about clean. Clean lines, clean sharp distinctions, and clean, spare furnishings. Empty the living room and start restoring furniture piece by piece. As soon as the living room has the look and feel you desire, stop there. The other pieces can be sold, donated, or used elsewhere if they have emotional connections. If you are choosing new furniture for your living room, aim for that staple that is included in modern design: clean lines. You will not find heavily ornate carved trims in modernized living rooms, nor a lot of curls or swirls. Stick to those design elements that feature straight, economic lines, lacking flair either mostly or altogether. Let your bookshelves double between storage and display, also. Use fabric or woven baskets to store items in logical places between favored books and a special few objects of art.

Let Light Move Around

First, let the sunlight in. The more natural light that enters the better. It gives an airy feeling to even a smaller living space. Try for sheer blinds and curtains to permit light entry while denying prying eyes. Add mirrors and other accessories with a shine to let the light move about the space, reflected and re-reflected to add the illusion of volume to a room. That natural brightness makes living rooms feel larger, and with gleaming surfaces on spare furnishings, you achieve a nice, sharp, modern feel.

Use Colors with Care

Start with using unified colors through the open spaces. Then paint the trims to your walls a lighter color than the walls themselves. Lighter trims make the wall beneath them appear to recede, seeming further away from onlooking eyes. Paint the ceiling as well, either the same shade as the walls or just a single shade lighter. This completes the room, giving it an almost curved effect to create an airy feeling.

Install an Electric Fireplace

Another way to add light with motion and actual warmth to a room is the addition of an electric fireplace. These are available as modern or as baroque as possible to please any taste. Again, choose simple, clean lines for that modern feel. Adding more light, and light that moves in entrancing, dancing ways, adds a feature to a room that combines timeless magic and modern airiness and flair.

Using colors and furnishings with care, you can take an existing space and make it seem larger and cleaner; you can modernize it with just a few steps. Add an electric fireplace and gleaming surfaces to reflect both firelight and natural light, letting illumination bounce around the room and make it seem bigger and airier. Your open space with its unified colors will be sure to wow visitors and please your eye everywhere it rests in your modern living room.