Coming home to a warm, inviting, and comfortably cozy environment after a long and stressful day is one of the greatest feelings in life. Today I’m sharing some tips on creating a cozy living space you can enjoy for years to come.
Having a safe space to unwind and decompress is incredibly important to our mental and emotional wellbeing, something which has become increasingly more important over the last year with the ongoing global situation.
If you’re thinking about redecorating your living space, or even indulging in a bit of feng shui – the basic idea of which is to move furniture to create a better balance with the natural world – there are several approaches you can take.
Create Warmth
Creating warmth in your living room can go a long way towards creating a cozy living space, and there are a few different avenues you can go down to achieve this.
For example, for literal warmth you can address more fundamental things like your windows. If you have draughty, poor-fitting windows it’s more likely you will lose heat through them, leaving your living room cold.
Similarly, you might also want to consider radiators with individual thermostats on them, which will give you the opportunity to manually control the temperature of the individual room, rather than having a constant set across the house. This can be especially helpful in winter, when sometimes you simply want to curl up on the sofa all day and just not move.
Not only this, but it could also help cut your energy costs as you’re able to control directly where the heat goes rather than having all radiators on in rooms that may hardly be used.
Alternatively, you can use color to create the illusion of warmth. By opting to use a darker, richer color palette, and by teaming these with fitting colors for any cushions, throws or even furniture, you can easily add the impression of warmth in a room without taking any drastic steps.
The Sofa
When creating a cozy living space. the use of furniture is common knowledge. If your intention is to build a snug environment to spend hours curled up in, it’s likely you’re going to want to have somewhere comfortable you can either sit, slouch, lie down on, or even nap for hours on end. For this, you’re going to want to the sofa.
There are many different sofa styles available to make this work, whilst again adding warmth, be it a conventional sofa, a Chesterfield, recliners, or even u shaped sofas. It’s also worth considering what material you want in your living room, for instance a cloth in a specific color or leather.
Corner and u-shaped sofas can often work well, as they offer a lot of space to spread out, creating the ultimate in napping environments.
Not only this, but in the case of a u-shaped sofa you can create a feature around it. For example, you may want to have a coffee table in the middle of it. Not only does this give you an opportunity to add other elements, such as a small potted plant, but it also adds a convenience factor when it comes to not reaching too far to put drinks down for example – keeping you perfectly relaxed. If you’ve got a central TV or fireplace, you could use that as a focal point to place your sofa around, which again will add to the relaxation factor.
Although there are many different options for laying out your room, creating an area of seclusion around your sofa will ultimately positively benefit your enjoyment, relaxation, and unwinding after a long day.
Lighting the room:
One other element to consider when creating a cozy living space at home is how you light the room. Having a harsher, brighter light is not recommended, and instead it would be more advisable to have softer, warmer lights in your room.
This is something which will pay dividends during the winter months, when there are fewer hours of daylight during the day and you’re likely to have the lights on for longer. Having warmer lights will help your body relax, and the more yellow the light being introduced the cosier you are likely to feel.
Dimmer switches can often be great way of controlling the amount of light within the room, as sometimes you might not want to sit there with lights all the way up. Similarly, you could introduce lamps around the sofa to create a pool of light where you’re sat.
Creating the feeling of a glow around the room gives a great relaxing vibe, which can be enhances through any reflective surfaces around the room – for instance, a mirror.
Whilst these are just three ways to achieve a warm environment in your home, ultimately there are boundless possibilities – and there will be things that work for you which might not work for others, so there’s no harm in experimenting with different things. You could try changing fragrances or layer the room up with different textures like rugs and throws.
Whatever you decide, having that space where we can feel truly relaxed and safe is something we can all aspire to. Hopefully these tips on creating a cozy living space will help you create the look you’ve always wanted.