If you haven’t been following along on stories, I’ve basically redesigned the main floor of my sister’s house room by room and now, I bring you my Sister’s Living Room Reveal!

My design challenge for this space was brought to me by Alyse’s husband in the form of two orange crushed velvet chairs. These chairs have been passed on to him by his late grandma. He didn’t want them recovered or anything done to them and they hold major sentimental value. So, the entire main floor has actually been designed with these chairs in mind – here we go!

Orange is super bold – but beautiful, but we cannot do a whole room of orange! So we brought in the gray to act as a grounding force. It makes the orange feel awesome but not overpowering. 

A lot of people don’t use color because they don’t know how. So if you break out the color wheel, complimentary colors are colors on opposite sides of the wheel. And if you pick out colors based off of how they make you feel, you can design a home that completely changes your emotions. Grays often carry purple and blue undertones which makes it a complimentary color to orange, and adds in the neutral to tone down the orange.

We started with the nook where the floating shelves are, and then moved onto the rest of the room. I will be sharing the tutorial for the shelves next week! I decided to carry the same wallpaper in the nook into the areas around her windows to brighten that space and carry over a patterned feature. Tackling window surrounds are hard, especially when there isn’t a lot of wall space around them, so have your scissors and razor blade ready to go. I used the same trick here that I did in the nook and cut and removed the backing as I went.

While I wallpapered, Alyse got to painting the window casing. We painted the window casing to make it pop as a feature and show off the details. They really wanted to showcase the board and batten around the window, so we decided not to do drapes, which is something I would normally do to soften a space and bring in another pattern.

For my Sister’s Living Room Reveal, I piazzed up the existing gallery wall.

I started by making an arch with just a string, pencil, and tack. And it actually worked. If you haven’t seen this before, all you need to do is attach a pencil to a string and then the string to the tack that’s in the wall, and trace an arch with the pencil. Make sure the string is pulled tight as you trace around so the arch comes out even. Next I drew the sides of the arch down the wall with a level. Then I taped along the lines, and painted it. Once it was done, I re-hung the gallery wall inside the arch!

You may recognize the rug I brought in for the space from my basement.

But I feel like it belongs here and has found its true home in this space. I love that it has two orange tones that align perfectly with the chairs. It perfectly unifies the entire color story. I didn’t go with a multicolored wallpaper because then it becomes over stimulating. The wallpaper and the rug create the perfect balance of patterns.

We removed the oversized brown sectional and chose more of a scaled down, light gray one. Anytime you can float a piece of furniture, such as a couch, it provides a better traffic flow. This also frees up wall space and visually opens the room. And we chose a couch with legs to lift it up off the ground to make the space feel even larger.

My brother-in-law plays the guitar, and I am a huge fan of using instruments as decor. 1. If you hang them up and they are visible, you will play them more often, and 2. They say something really cool about you. Like ‘hey I can play a cool instrument.’ Your home should always reflect you. I used the same guitar hanger and anchors I used in my son’s room and hung them on either side of the gallery wall – I love this look so much!

Designer tip: Get multifunctional pieces that you can move around the home, especially if you like to entertain.

For example, the poofs I chose can be brought in front of the chairs to be used as footstools. Or they can provide extra seating. I finished off the space with a beautiful coffee table and a small cabinet behind the couch to anchor it in the room, as well as some other accessories to pull the whole space together.

I always love to pull a good mood board together and this living room was so personal and fun and I felt my creative juices were really flowing. And I love to work with my sister on any project! In case you missed it, her entry way makeover was quite the project! 

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