How To Decorate A Living Room Look Better - 20 Ideas and Tips

It's not enough to just find the best sofa to make your look nice. Having comfy furniture is important, but living room wall decor ideas are what will really make the space feel more unique, beautiful, and interesting.

Your living room should be a place where you can relax, let down your guard, and spend quality time with friends, family, or just yourself. It doesn't matter if your style is traditional, modern, casual, or dressy. There's a knack to making a space look good and work well for you. So, get ready for your professional makeover of your living room by reading these designer tips and tricks. Feel free to use any of these.

But if you want to know how to really decorate your walls, you're in luck. Our interior designers have given us all of their best ideas about how to decorate a living room? These include everything from adding wallpaper and architectural details to hanging three-dimensional objects and using accent lighting. You can get ideas from this list no matter what style you want.

These are just a few ways about how to decorate a living room? You can use more than one. The most interesting results will come from combining several ideas, like an accent wall with floating shelves or bold curtains on either side of a piece of art that makes a statement. You will be fine as long as you take care of your walls.

How to Decorate a Living Room?

1. Mix Light and Dark

When the living room is all white and bright, it might feel too "clean" and public. It can feel like a cave at night. But when you mix dark and light colors, you get a lively look with depth and balance. At least a little black and white is good for the style of any room.

2. Contrast Your Neutrals

Decorating a living room with a range of neutrals that are different from each other, in addition to white and black, makes it feel rich and inviting. The yellow brick wall and floor, the caramel leather sofa and pillows, the dark tables, and the white sofa all stand out against each other, showing off their different tones and finishes. This makes the color scheme feel full even before important things like pattern and texture are added.

3. Play With Texture

It's easy to forget about texture when organizing a living room because we don't see it as much as we touch it. But it's important to make the living room feel cozy, and that goes for both soft textures that feel good and rough textures that make the room stand out. As many different surfaces as you can think of: metal, stone, glass, plants, leather, cotton, wool, and so on. If you want to know that how to decorate a living room? without spending a lot of money, pillows are a great place to start. You can add new materials to the mix through accessories and furniture, even if it's just a little at a time.

4. Work in Some Wood

Wood is one of the best ways to make a living room feel warm, so we can't talk about texture without mentioning it.

Adding wood in a lot of different ways will all make a room feel warmer and friendlier. Wall paneling, side tables, stools that can be moved, picture frames, sofa legs, and carved art are just a few of the many choices.

5. Mix Up Your Upholstery

Of course, most furniture places let you buy a whole living room set with upholstery that matches, but that doesn't mean you should. Matching upholstery can make a formal seating area look more grown up and organized. But if you want your living room to feel warm and inviting, mix and match your upholstery to give the design some personality.

One of the best ways to do this is to mix leather chairs with fabric sofas or fabric sofas with leather chairs. This way, the different materials stand out in a way that is clearly on purpose. The different shapes and sizes of the furniture in the living room give everyone in the family more choices for how to sit.

6. Choose Practical Fabrics

When we talk about upholstery, it's important that the chairs in the living room are both comfy and long-lasting. Your family will decide what this means. You might have babies or little kids, pets or not, and they might be messy or clean. For the most part, fabrics with mid-tones are the best choice. Very light or dark shades will show dirt and wear more easily.

Because it's so easy to wipe clean, leather is a great material for keeping things from getting stained. But it gets scratched more easily than most fabrics, so pets might not be able to handle it as well. Leather that already looks worn in or has a design on it can age very well.

Velvet and denim are two other materials that can be soft and long-lasting. Plus, compared to the plain cotton or wool furniture you usually see in shops, they add a fun twist.

When picking out fabric for your living room furniture, try to find a mix of natural and synthetic fabrics so that you can get the best of both worlds. If you can, bend a fabric piece to make sure the weave looks tight and doesn't show the backing material. Weaves that are tight will last longer than ones that are open, which gives dirt more places to hide.

7. Add a Dash of Color

Even though you can make a beautiful space without any bright colors, adding even a little color to a living room can make it feel more relaxed and welcoming. A happy blue is a color that most people can agree on when they're not sure what to choose. It looks great with warm things like leather and wood, and it's neutral enough to go with almost any other accent color you choose in the future.

8. Add a Patterned Rug

Pattern is a strong design element that can add life to a living room and hide stains or signs of wear. The "fifth wall," or floor, gets these same benefits from a patterned rug. It anchors a sitting area and brings life to the whole room. You might want to add a rug to your seating area even if you already have flooring. You'll be glad you had it when you have to roll it up to take it to the cleaners for the first time after a big spill.

9. Choose Movable Tables and Stools

A living room is much more comfortable when it has tables, stools, ottomans, and even side chairs that are light and easy to move around. This gives you and your family many choices every day for where to put your feet up, put a drink down, or add an extra seat.

Use a few smaller pieces, like cushioned footstools, so that you can move things closer or farther away from the main table as needed.

10. Consider Conversational Distances

Even if your living room is very big, there is a maximum number of people that can sit in a group and still be comfortable for small talk and meetings. For easy conversation, there should be about 8 feet of space between seats. This means that if you have a sofa and side chairs or several couches, the seating area should be 8 feet across, or 4 feet from the middle.

A big sectional couch with 12 seats might look great and be great for a party, but if you want to make your living room more cozy, it's better to use fewer, smaller seating pieces and move them closer together.

11. Don’t Take It Too Seriously

A gallery wall of art, throw pillows that you can mix and match, open storage baskets, and fun furniture are all great ways to add thoughtful chaos to the living room.

If you try to keep everything in order, anything that isn't will stand out like a sore thumb. But if you can handle a little chaos now and then, the odd dropped toy or hanging blanket will fit right in.

12. Curate a Gallery Wall

It's no secret that gallery walls look great. This tried-and-true way to hang art can look many different ways, such as a modern gallery wall with frames that match and are all the same size, a nostalgic gallery wall with black-and-white photos that go together, or an eclectic gallery wall with a mix of different mediums, colors, shapes, and sizes.

13. Create a Mirror Moment

From Ettore Sottsass's Ultrabroad mirror from the 1970s going back in style to Anthropologie's Gleaming Primrose mirror going viral, mirrors are having a moment. You could hang a large mirror on the wall behind your sofa or put a freestanding mirror on a wall that isn't being used to make the room feel bigger.

14. Hang Three-Dimensional Objects

Use things you already have around the house as wall art in your living room. Find old plates or cookware and put them on display for a cozy look. When you travel, get a handmade basket from each place you go and hang them up for everyone to see. It's nice to look at these three-dimensional screens.

15. Put Up a Picture Ledge

Put up a picture ledge instead of nails and hooks to hang your framed art. This will make your favorite pieces stand out. That's great if you have a lot of art to show off, because picture frames let you change out your art often. The style is also a little more modern and cleaner than the usual panel wall.

16. Consider an Antique Mantel

Look through salvage yards and retro shops in your area for a fancy old mantle. Then, put it to use to make a fake fireplace that will add a classic touch to your living room. It doesn't matter that you can't start a fire; what matters is how interesting it looks. If you can believe it, the fireplace above is fake. Here's how to make one yourself.

17. Utilize Wall Lighting

There are many ways about how to decorate a living room? with different types of wall lights. Picture lights shine light on your art, and sconces can draw attention to interesting building details in your living room or just make the atmosphere better. Make sure all of your lights have dimmers so you can change the mood throughout the day.

18. Embrace Bold Drapery

If you want to show off your style, try using bold drapery. If you like to try new things with color, pattern, or both, flowy window treatments will quickly make your living room wall art stand out. Also, if your tastes change, they're very simple to switch out.

19. Experiment With Floating Shelves

Adding decor to any wall in your living room is easy and doesn't cost much with floating shelves. You can always change how these open surfaces look by adding your favorite things and family heirlooms, so you'll never get tired of having them in your space. When placed on either side of the fireplace or TV, they look especially stylish.

20. Go Vertical With Shelving

Looking for a bigger idea for living room wall art? Floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with your best books, plants, home decor, and other things are a great idea. This low-lift method gives your living room both vertical interest and stacked depth. It also saves space by making it easier to store and show off your memories.