Updating the Living Room

Photo: Eric Diesel

Before she feeds William Holden cherry pie for breakfast and finds an excuse to have him shed his shirt in Picnic, Verna Felton states that "no one works on Labor Day." Watching this film is a Labor Day tradition in our urban home, but we don't necessarily adhere to that sentiment. For a lot of homebodies, Labor Day is a weekend for small homekeeping tasks and large home improvement projects; of preparing to bid farewell to summer and to welcome autumn through the time-honored rituals of deep cleaning, organizing, purging, refreshing, repairing.

Labor Day usually finds us taking on a large-scale project to update a room in our urban home. Last year, we updated the dining area. This year’s project was to finish updating the living room. According to a traffic manager at our local Ikea, we are not alone in using this weekend for home improvement. Speaking unofficially, she told us that this is the busiest weekend of the year where she works. Our experience visiting her store on Saturday on a quest for new bookcases bore that out. When was the last time you heard about an Ikea so busy that they ran out of cinnamon rolls?

It is always helpful when headed to a big box store to have done your homework. Knowing what you need -- where it will be placed, what function(s) it will serve -- helps you translate the display ideas into real projects you can realize. The internet is invaluable in this regard. After measuring the wall the shelves were going to inhabit, we plotted out the pieces we needed and were able to hit the showroom with a detailed list. This allowed us to streamline the process of getting materials on a crowded selling day, and helped us stay on budget for the project -- important in a store where incidentals find their way into your blue plastic shopping bag wore insidiously than any other store I know except, perhaps, Sephora.

Setting up new shelves in the library was the keystone step in redecorating the living room, for the old library shelves -- dependable pieces that have lasted fifteen years and counting since we got them at Conran's -- were headed to new quarters in the living room. The shelves we chose for the library are versatile, sturdy and easy to assemble. Also, importantly, they are adjustable, allowing for room to grow in a library where books and collectibles always multiply. To manage that, we usually go through books and magazines in January, but this Labor Day, we got a head start, shredding two boxes worth of recycling and filling two bags with books to trade at The Strand for, yes, more books.

Photo: Eric Diesel

The former library shelves have been repurposed in the living room as display shelves for our collection of cowboy kitsch. As a child of the West, I have never fully escaped the charm of bucking bronco teapots, covered wagon cookie jars, vintage cactus glasses, teepee salt and pepper shakers, Roy Rogers posters, cap guns, toy horsies, bandanas. I have been collecting Western kitsch for over twenty years. With such a large collection, pieces have been displayed on rotation. With the shelves in the living room, there is more display room, and the displays themselves look better. For, though Western collectibles provide a charm that almost everyone who visits remarks upon, we wanted to get away from the idea of a western theme room such as one might find in a campy restaurant. We wanted the western pieces to lend warmth and character without upstaging the room itself, believing that when collections overtake rooms it hampers the room's effectiveness. As a design element, collections are motifs that give rooms character while highlighting the personalities of inhabitants, but they can so easily shift to clutter. The shelves organize the collection almost museum-style, which in turn highlights their charm. And that, in turn, creates a wonderful vibe in the room.

Floor plan, so crucial in every room, is especially important in a living room. Even if they don't personally believe in the practice, most decorators have encountered the concept of the focal point: a feature in a room that initiates and culminates the visual experience, and around which the room is often designed. Often a focal point is an architectural feature such as a fireplace or a picture window, and too often it is a more mundane object such as the tv set. Often in urban living rooms, in which living quarters are carved out of space in an entirely different way than in suburban or rural homes, there is no built-in focal point and if there is, it's oddly placed or proportioned.

Our urban home is no different. The living room is an open-ended rectangle -- not unusual in and of itself, but a decorator's challenge by arrangement. One long side of the rectangle is open to the entryway, and therefore the front door. Thus upon entry into the apartment, the first vista a visitor sees is the opposite long side of the rectangle. That wall is the focal point, not just of the living room but the entryway as well. It is pretty much the first thing you see when you enter the apartment, and we wanted to maximize the impact of that moment.

We considered many ideas for that wall, from placing the shelves there so that the western collectibles caught the eye to painting the wall a showstopping color. However, we wanted to create a room that was usable as well as well-decorated (really, there should be no difference between these two concepts), and realistically it was best to arrange the furniture so that the sofa sat against that long wall, with occasional chairs and the media center providing counterpoint on the short walls. It made sense to use the furniture itself as the focal point upon entering the room, knowing that by using color we could create visual punch and then use proportion to anchor the experience so that it was an invitation into a pleasing environment.

The room is a rectangle but -- again not atypical in urban homes -- the proportion is slightly off. Rather than the 2:4 ratio of a classically rectangular room, the ratio is closer to 2.5:4. To reflect a classically ratioed room, one would typically choose furnishings reflecting the classic ratio -- for example, an sofa whose rectangles individually and collectively mirror the depth by width ratio of the room. But a room without strict proportionality gives you freedom to play and so we did.

The first step of this project was finding new furniture. After several Saturday afternoons spent in showrooms, we found investment pieces modeled after mid-century design, a motif that's resurged in popularity due to such cultural influences as Mad Men but which, in our aesthetic, had never gone away. As in all design, proportion is a key element, and the proportions of mid-century design agree perfectly with those of our living room.

We chose a sleek, angular sofa to place against that wall and had it upholstered in textured fabric in a rich paprika hue. We placed vintage paintings of desert landscapes above the sofa, separated by a vintage wall sconce from a child's cowboy-themed bedroom suite. We chose chunky side tables in chocolate wood and topped them with brushed metal lamps. To counter the angularity of the sofa, tables and picture frames, the lamps have a curvy silhouette, while their metal construction material echoes the glass-topped metal end tables, sitting side by side like the good soldiers they are, that we have used in lieu of a coffee table for twenty years and saw no reason to replace.

To further counterpoint the right angles and rectangles in the room, we choose a side-chair in curved wood and whiskey leather that would not have been out of place in the card parlour of a saloon. That is paired with a handsome slipper chair whose upholstery echoes the sofa fabric by weave and the other side chair by color, but whose silhouette refers again to the rectangular proportion of the room. These are grouped in a light arc around a round table in the same chocolate wood as the sofa side tables.

Photo: Eric Diesel

The sofa provides the signature color for the room. Paprika is used judiciously as a color for the room's accessories -- the pots housing live succulents, the trays holding piles of scrapbooks. The other colors in the room are whiskey, chocolate, chestnut, and a touch of antique gold. The shelves and media center are all flat black, which works well for background furnishings as it recedes while providing foundation. The riotous prints and graphics on the spines of media cases cannot take over the space if they are lined up (alphabetically, please) along strict black shelves.

Along with color and proportion, an important element for room design is texture. Proportion creates the space and color enlivens it, but texture provides the all-important invitation to inhabit a space. Though we associate texture with touch, it is also a visual element. Leather, wood, mica and metal create a visual dialogue. Add ceramic and weave and that dialogue becomes a tactile experience. All of these elements -- color, proportion and texture -- are anchored, literally, by a rug whose pattern is in the exact colors in the room and which sits -- texture again -- on a floor of chestnut hardwood.

This has been a long project, first begun three years ago and completed successively in stages. If I have learned anything from my own experience and that of readers from whom I hear, it is not just that decorating in stages is common among home projects but that decorating is an ongoing process. Rooms that do not live and grow and change along with the people inhabiting them belong in museums, not homes. There is always something more to do, something that needs to be fixed, something new to try. This is one of the pleasures of homekeeping -- being so attuned to our space that our space evolves as we do. Perhaps that's why, when homekeepers hear that "no one works on Labor Day," we think to ourselves that, whatever project we're undertaking, it isn't really work. Unless, in recognition of another milestone that occurs on or around Labor Day, we decide to call it "homework."