A small living room that works harder
This room is 3.4 by 4 meters, and it is a living room, a guest room, and an office. We put 5 pieces in it, and every one of them does 2 jobs.
By June Whitlock2 min read
Living room / Small space / Storage
Small rooms are not furnished with small furniture. They are furnished with fewer pieces, each one chosen because it can change its job at 10 at night when a friend needs the sofa.
A sofa that is also the spare bed
The Otto sofa bed is a sofa first: the seat is the same foam as our other sofas, and it does not feel like a bed in disguise. Its back folds flat to make a double bed in 1 movement, without pulling anything out from underneath, so the coffee table only has to move half a meter.
Tables that get out of the way
The Saga nesting tables are the small-room coffee table. Apart, they are 2 side tables; together, a coffee table; stacked in a corner, nothing. When the sofa becomes a bed, they are the bedside tables.
Go up the wall
Floor space is the thing you are short of, so storage goes up. The Tiko slatted shelf hangs on the wall above the sofa and holds a shelf’s worth of books in no floor at all. The Lowe media console is low and long under the window, where nothing taller would fit, and its drawers are the office: laptop, chargers, and the paper that never gets filed.
Light for 3 jobs
One overhead light makes a small room feel like a corridor. The Linus desk lamp sits on the console and swings: over the sofa for reading, over the console for work, and away to the wall for a guest.
- Keep every piece on legs. Floor you can see is floor the room gets credit for.
- One color for the big piece, the walls’ color for everything else.
- A mirror opposite the window, not beside it.
- Nothing wider than the door it came through, which in this flat is 78 cm.
