The Heart of the Home

Living Room Interior Design · Charlotte, North Carolina

An open plan gives you no walls to push furniture against, so the seating has to draw its own room. The rug sets that boundary, and the round ottoman in the middle keeps the group from having a hard corner anyone has to walk into. The two swivel chairs are the working part of the plan: they turn toward the windows when the room is quiet and back into the floor plan when there are people in it. That flexibility is the thing an open plan actually needs, more than any single beautiful piece.

Nearly everything you sit on here is curved—the sofa back, the barrel chairs, the round ottoman, the arch of the built-in niche—and all of it is set against the grid of the window muntins, the straight ceiling beams and the square edge of the oak cabinetry. Curves in a room this rectilinear are not decoration; they are what keeps the furniture from reading as a second set of boxes. Backs are kept low across the board so nothing rises into the glass, and the view stays available from every seat.

The color plan is a wide field of warm ivory across the walls, ceiling, drapery, upholstery and rug, with accents allowed in only two places: caramel on the pair of chairs and the pillows, olive on the ottoman. Limiting accents to two colors and repeating each of them at least twice is what makes a neutral room look decided rather than unfinished. The dark floor and the slim dark rods draw the edges the pale field would otherwise lose.

The drapery rod runs the full wall and past the outer windows, so the panels stack on plaster instead of covering glass.