3 Ways to Liven Up Your Living Room

A surprising number of living rooms are decorated a plain, clinical-looking white. What do you do if you have a bland and colourless room like this? If you don’t want to learn painting skills and take up a huge project, you need a few clever ways to bring some colour in. The secret is to realize that for a quick infusion of colour, you can just decorate your living room with colourful touches.

Introduce splashes of colour everywhere

You can bring in colour in a number of ways. The easiest choice is to go out shopping for little display items to place all over your living room. A brightly-coloured table lamp, fake coral and little flower vases can offer some relief from the relentless white of the walls. For more splashes of colour, you can look for colourful rugs for the floor and throw pillows to put on the sofas and armchairs.

If you can extend your budget a bit further, colour is an option in furniture, too. These touches can change the way your living room looks so much that you may not even notice the white walls. When you do notice them, they can seem like a tasteful background to the colourfulness seen all around.

If all-new furniture seems a bit expensive, you can do the next best thing – call in an upholstery service to redo your sofas in vibrant fabric.

You don’t necessarily need bright colours if you can have interesting patterns, instead

At one time, upholstery fabric designers chose floral patterns almost exclusively. While flowers and leaves can be cheerful enough, though, they aren’t as invigorating as some modern designs.

Upholstery doesn’t necessarily have to feature small, busy patterns, repeated endlessly. It can feature larger themes, too. Large, geometrical shapes placed precisely at the center of each sofa seat or back, is one possibility. You can also have large, printed animals, fractals or cartoon characters. You need to shop around and not settle for unimaginative patterns.

When you decide to become adventurous with your upholstery, you don’t necessarily need to limit yourself to the sofas. Your curtains give you a far larger canvas. You can have huge sunflowers, portraits or scenery that unfolds when you draw your curtains shut.

Speaking of portraits…

Family photographs and large prints of your favorite paintings and can be the easiest ways to bring great character and colour to your living room. You just need to work out a plan for how many prints and photographs you’ll put on your walls.

Your choice of wall art doesn’t have to be restricted to paintings and photographs. You can mount a beautiful collection of silver trays on your walls, get bookshelves filled with lots of volumes or shop for fabric wall hangings.

If you are interested in indoor gardening, covering half of a wall with a vertical garden can bring colour like nothing else you can imagine. When you have one of these gardens, you will almost be grateful for your drab white walls. If it weren’t for them, your creative touches wouldn’t show as well.

Amy Grimshaw is an interior decorator. She loves sharing her ideas for interior design on decorating blogs. Visit the www.made.com website to mix and match and get more ideas.