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95 Living Room Ideas You’ll Love for Classic, Rustic, Traditional, and Modern Family Spaces
These decorating ideas will help you transform your living room into the country retreat of your dreams.
Here at Country Living, how to decorate a living room is an important and hot topic (after all, Living is our last name!). Throughout the decades, we’ve seen our fair share of living room ideas in the most idyllic farmhouses, charming country cottages, rustic lakeside retreats, and more from coast to coast and beyond. To bring you our favorite living room design ideas, we’ve sifted through our extensive house tour archives to curate the very best classic, rustic, traditional, and modern living room ideas you are sure to love.
So let's get into it. If you are looking for small living room ideas, we have included ideas for small spaces and cozy living room ideas that are as charming as can be. We’ve called out clever decorating tips and tricks to maximize your space, like ideal furniture placement, window treatment tricks, and picking the just-right living room paint colors to pull your whole look together (including a ton of neutral living room ideas!).
Whatever size your family space is, one thing we've discovered over and over is that, especially in the living room, personal style rules. Whether it’s how to display your collections, filling wall space with a genius gallery wall, making room to seat a crowd, or setting a deep sense of place, a personalized approach to decorating your living room is a top priority. Maybe you want a quick refresh, or perhaps you're starting from scratch. Either way, you’ve come to the right place for loads of living room inspiration!
Here are even more ideas for decorating your living room:
Layer on Pattern (Lots of It!)
To achieve a casual, effortlessly layered-over-time look, one design trick is to settle on a not-too-contrived, not-too-matchy color scheme. “We had more textiles than we had places for, so we had to keep making more pillows!” says designer Katie Rosenfeld. Other pretty fabric touches in the living room: the patterned curtains, which pull together all the colors in the space, and a big bench-seat sofa. Neutral bamboo shades help balance it all. “I always try to layer woven shades underneath drapery, and the bamboo felt very beachy,” says Katie.
Go Tone on Tone
In this South Carolina living room, the homeowner used brick pavers from his grandparents' old home for the new fireplace façade. Layered against the creamy wood walls and hardwood floors is a mix of neutrals such as a mohair-and-leather sofa, parchment shades atop iron lamps, and a sisal rug.
Face Off a Pair of Sofas
A facing pair of sofas allows for easy conversation! Covered in sumptuous blue velvet, these 8-foot-long Chesterfield sofas are just as comfy as they are swanky. The driftwood coffee table, layered rugs, old-world oil paintings, and pinky-red pillows warm up the blue-and-white scheme in this California bungalow.
Flank a Fireplace with Matching Chairs
In this serene living room, a pair of matching upholstered wing chairs creates a cozy spot for conversation by the fire. If you’re using mismatched antique chairs, it's okay if the frames are slightly different in style, just reupholster them in the same fabric to give the visual feeling of a pair. And, don’t forget the throw pillows—they are a great way to introduce additional color and pattern to a room.
RELATED: See more of this California cottage that is filled with color and vintage collections.
Display Your Collections
Amateur lakeshore paintings, most found for $10-$15, make for a cohesive (and affordable!) collection above the fireplace and sofa. Homeowner Abby Albers pulled in a black plaid rug to ground her more colorful flea market finds, including a pair of floral upholstered chairs. “They reminded me of something my grandma would have had, and I built everything else around them,” she says. “I love that they don’t match anything.”
RELATED: See more of Abby's vintage-filled lake cabin that feels like summer camp for grown-ups.
Clad the Room with Reclaimed Wood
The owners of this Mississippi barn aimed to use locally sourced materials, which included raw and distressed wood panels from a nearby military depot. While you could paint the panels white, the natural color of the wood adds built-in warmth and texture to the space.
RELATED: 6 Best Places to Find or Buy Reclaimed Wood Near You
Paint the Fireplace
Even though the painted fireplace in this 1910 bungalow was a happy accident, its watery blue hue is the perfect complement to the rustic wood paneling. Plus now it's a dynamic focal point in this cozy space. “We had no choice but to paint it, which ended up helping tie the whole room together,” says designer Erica Harrison of Detroit-based design firm Hudson and Sterling.
Get the Look:
Fireplace Paint Color: Philipsburg Blue by Benjamin Moore
Add a Cool Rug
In this collected living space, the medley of books, art, and furniture is pulled together with a 1930s Moroccan rug underfoot. Antique rugs are ideal for high-traffic areas due to their durability, plus they add loads of design personality.
Get the Look:
Walls, Millwork, and Ceiling Paint Color: Mouse's Back by Farrow & Ball
RELATED: Tour more of this charming Cashiers, North Carolina, cottage for loads of decorating ideas.
Brighten Up with Floral Fabrics
This Catskills home is bursting with color and beautiful florals from ceiling to floor. “You can sum up our aesthetic in three words,” said owner Jason Oliver Nixon of Madcap Cottage. “No. Beige. Sofas.” Painting the ceiling beams a teal shade turns up the volume on this charming architectural detail.
RELATED: See how this cozy schoolhouse is packed with larger-than-life charm.
Paint the Ceiling
You’re going to paint your ceiling anyway—you might as well make it worth your time. Here, a moody blue den gets the full cocoon-like treatment. At first, the ceiling was white, “but it didn't feel cozy enough, so we painted it the next year,” says homeowner and designer Stephenie Watts.
Get the Look:
Wall, Ceiling, and Trim Paint Color: Midnight Blue by Benjamin Moore
RELATED: 35 Pretty Living Room Paint Colors for Walls, Trim, Ceilings, and More
Utilize Every Inch
In this sweet seaside Martha’s Vineyard cottage, exposed joists and beams exude an easy, breezy vibe, creating a no-fuss way to display books, knickknacks, and meaningful mementos.
Get the Look:
Wall, Ceiling, and Trim Paint Color: All White by Farrow & Ball
RELATED: This Martha's Vineyard retreat is the ultimate kick-back kind of cottage.
Conceal Clutter with Apothecary Cabinet Storage
An antique dealer filled her California cottage home with an assortment of found treasures including a distressed apothecary cabinet, which provides plenty of drawers and areas to conceal clutter, like remotes and games. Open shelves below display more attractive accessories, like books and blankets.
Build a Bar Area
Carve out space for refreshments. After all, time in the country is all about relaxing! Use a buffet or sideboard, like this antique hunt board, and top with pretty lighting (brass lamps and candles), barware, and trays of cocktail fixin’s.
Get the Look:
Wall Paint: Roycroft Pewter SW 2848 by Sherwin-Williams
Ceiling & Trim Paint: Tricorn Black SW 6258 by Sherwin-Williams
RELATED: Take a look inside this incredible hunting lodge before and after.
Don’t Hide the TV
Let’s face it: The television is a big part of life in your den. We binge our fair share of Yellowstone, too! In this central Georgia vacation home, vintage French baskets (both round and rectangular) mixed with a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of hunting-themed art surrounds the television. Hide cords and plug-in devices for a clean look.
Choose No-Fuss Fabrics
The colorful pillow assortment, including a few made from vintage kilims, pops against the two-story-high whitewashed pine walls. “Everything in the barn is essentially indestructible, like our timeworn rugs and sectional slipcovers,” says designer Emily Griffin. “You can enjoy the house more when you aren’t worried about stains and breakages.”
Editor’s Tip: Consider outdoor fabrics for high-traffic areas. The styles and textures have come a long way!
Get the Look:
Bench Coffee Table: For similar, Farmhouse Wood Bench from Amazon
Create a Secondary Seating Area
With the cozy and casual gathering spot established at one end of the living room, Victoria and Marcus Ford created a secondary sitting area at the opposite, starting with a plush patterned rug to define the space. Victoria layered the pair of wicker club chairs with salmon lumbar pillows and an heirloom family quilt. Behind, the wall features a trio of collected vintage favorites: a flea market painting, a framed nautical flag, and a brass bell.
Editor’s Tip: Lightweight furniture like these wicker chairs makes for it easy to "pull up a chair" to seat a crowd.
RELATED: Get this living room's step-by-step makeover details.
Embrace Wood Paneling
When wood paneling is this handsome, resist the urge to paint over it. “It’s as if the paneled walls were color-matched to a bottle of bourbon,” says Country Living Editor-in-Chief Rachel Hardage Barrett of her Mississippi hunting lodge. Two green velvet sofas, brass lighting, and a black-and-gold mirror bring even more elevated country sophistication to this gathering space.
RELATED: Take a look inside this incredible hunting lodge before and after.
Go Coastal
Create a beachy feeling, no matter where you live. Shades of the coastal blue hue ebb and flow throughout Jamie Gluck and John Wentworth’s Maine home, as seen on the collection of vintage ship paintings, sofa, Danish armchair cushions, and the chippy Early American laundry stand that serves as the living room’s coffee table.
RELATED: This 1940s Maine cottage is a joyful reminder of summers past.
Hang the Ultimate Gallery Wall
In his one-bedroom Leighton, Alabama, cottage, homeowner Anthony Brewington had one rule for his gallery wall: Each piece be black and white. His assemblage of vintage etchings and pen-and-ink drawings has an effortless assembled-over-time feel. Simple black frames with white mattes further tie all the pieces together.
RELATED: Here are 50+ gallery wall ideas to display your favorite artwork and photos.
Create Lodgelike Vibes
Even if you don’t have a wall of moss rock surrounding the fireplace or a timbered ceiling of white oak and elm, you can still create a lodgelike feel to your living room with cozy rugs and blankets and a cool setup for listening to music. Here, homeowners Jeff and Jill Murphy made music the focal point with Jeff’s vintage vinyl collection. Organize records and equipment in cubbies or on a corner shelf.
RELATED: Check out all the rooms of this dream cottage located on Minnesota's Lake Pulaski.
Amy Mitchell is the managing editor for VERANDA and Country Living, where she writes articles on a variety of topics—decorating and design, gardens, and holidays. Amy’s experience in the shelter magazine category spans more than 20 years, as she’s previously held positions at Coastal Living and Cottage Living. Her personal pursuits include cooking, gardening, and hunting her favorite tag sale spots for the next piece of Pyrex for her prized collection.
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