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Interiors by room
A living room is almost never just a living room. In most of our projects it shares space with the kitchen and dining area, and the real question isn't which sofa to choose but where the boundary between the areas falls and how it's marked: a change of flooring, a step in the ceiling, lighting, or the way the furniture faces.
The second thing these images show is how the room works in the evening. A living room is used under artificial light more often than in daylight, so the design splits its lighting into several circuits: ambient lighting, directional light over the seating area, and accent lighting for niches and shelving. A single chandelier in the middle of the ceiling can't handle any of these on its own.
In our projects, a living room starts not with a sofa against the wall but with how people move through it: from the entrance to the balcony, from the kitchen to the television, without bumping into furniture or interrupting people talking at the table. If a through-route runs behind the sofa, we often turn its back to the room, which keeps the walkway clear and still lets the seats face each other for conversation. The television goes where you can see it from the sofa without turning your head, not wherever there's a free wall: that's decided when the furniture is laid out, not when the television is delivered.
One lighting circuit rarely covers everything a living room is used for: morning coffee, an evening conversation and watching a film each need a different brightness and direction of light. So the lighting is split into separate circuits on dimmers: the ambient lighting dims almost to nothing for a film, a floor lamp by the armchair stays on for reading, and the backlighting behind the television works independently, reducing the contrast between a dark room and a bright screen so the eyes tire less. Niches and shelving get their own accent lighting, switched separately from the ambient lighting; otherwise, in the evening, the room is either fully lit or in darkness, with nothing in between.
When a living room adjoins the kitchen and dining area, the same flooring usually continues throughout, so the space reads as a whole rather than splitting into rooms within a room. Instead of a seam, a rug marks the boundary and visually anchors the seating area, with no change in floor level or separate finish. Fabrics (upholstery, curtains, the rug) matter here for acoustics as well as looks: without them, conversation in a living room with a hard floor and large windows echoes.
In a living room, remote controls, cables, chargers and other small things usually go into built-in storage: closed compartments in the shelving, cable trunking behind the TV unit, a drawer in the coffee table. This is planned together with the furniture layout, not bought separately after moving in, when there's nowhere left to put the cables and things that shouldn't be on show.