I’ve always wanted to put together a room from scratch, but I haven’t gotten a chance until now. I lived in a series of dorms where the provided furniture essentially imposed a style on me – usually a drab one. Then, my first two apartments were chosen based on location and functionality, and factors such as roommates and inherited furniture/junk made most rooms crowded storage spaces. But in making this cross-country move, my wife and I have been able to upgrade into a larger and more modern apartment, and we decided to shed almost all the furniture we’d accumulated in school.
As a result, we essentially had a blank canvas in the living room aside from the constraints of the paint and floor colors: the walls are white, the ceiling is a dark sage green, the doorways and doors are a dark gray, and the floor is a medium warm gray with hints of brown. Based on this, we chose the following color scheme consisting of mint green, sage green, beige/taupe, silver/gray, and black, drawing from the existing spectrum and also coincidentally centered on the shades of green-blue that we had themed our wedding registry on years ago. I say coincidentally because until a few days ago, those items had been stored in my parents’ attic for more than half a decade, as we never had space for them and entirely forgot what we’d been gifted.
I quickly sketched out thoughts on how this might end up looking:
And after finding candidate items, I made a crude mock-up in Photoshop (it became obvious in the sketch above that a pure black coffee table wouldn’t bridge the couch and TV well, so we instead opted for neutral glass with a more subtle black lower shelf):
It took two weeks to gather everything together and clean up the mess of boxes originally occupying the living room. But I think what was so fun about this is that it wasn’t a pre-designed set – there’s a certain rush that comes with trying to bring together items from many places and brands and find out how they communicate with each other … while staying within a fairly tight budget (I think we spent roughly $1000 on the new items, with the TV, TV stand, and game consoles/games already in our possession). Sources included Ashley Furniture, Home Depot, Amazon (various brands), Target, Blue Sky Cottage, Michaels, and Etsy.
I’m sure the final product isn’t to everyone’s tastes, but it’s very pleasing to me because for the first time, I have a room to live in that is also an expression of myself (and my wife), rather than an expression of the building. I grew up with a house entirely uncoordinated in terms of colors, patterns, or styles – it was purely functional, and usually a mess (partly my fault). I distinctly remember the first time I visited someone’s house and realized that people actually themed rooms with conscious visions. While most design-oriented people were also into very spare, “clean and neat” feels – mirrored in new workplaces and museums I encountered – I knew I could never live in a place like that. With many interests, I just have a lot of stuff, and I feel like a room should be there to help you access and make sense of that stuff, rather than hide it away. So, this final product is also functional – the game consoles and games are still very accessible; large books are freely scattered under the clear coffee table (so you can see what they are), and the smaller books are organized by genre (and labeled as such) on the bookshelf. The placemats double as food-catchers and non-slip laptop mats. Spare cables are in the open, contained in the mint-colored basket, while tools are in the bottom right quadrant under the TV. The glass bowl in the middle is for essential knick-knacks that we always lose otherwise. Compared to the old scenario – books in book boxes, cables in cable drawers, small coffee table covered in random piles of stuff – the things are both more visible as well as less obtrusive. In retrospect, my previous rooms always became a mess because the obfuscation made it impossible to know where things belonged, resulting in nothing belonging anywhere. It has been so eye-opening to realize that clarity and cohesion can actually unite, rather than exclude, such a disparate set of possessions.