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For about two years, our living room was the room I quietly closed the door on.
It is the biggest room in the house. It has the best light. And I did almost nothing with it, because every time I sat down to plan it I ended up scrolling farmhouse living room ideas that had clearly never had a person in them. All white. Nothing on the floor. One stem in a vase. Beautiful, and completely useless to me.
Our house was built in 1941. It is green, it has a woodstove, the floors are not level, and there is a terrier who sheds on everything he loves. Most of what gets written about farmhouse living rooms is written for a house that does not exist yet. I needed ideas for the house I already have.
So here is what I have actually done, slowly, in a room that gets used hard by a toddler, a dog, a cat who believes she owns the sofa, and me on the days my body decides how much I am doing.
Start with how the room actually gets used
Before I bought a single thing, I sat in there for a week and paid attention. Not planning. Just noticing.
Here is what I learned. We almost never sat on the far end of the sofa. Lochlan played on the floor by the window, every single day, always the same three feet of rug. Danny reads at night in the corner. Dewey sleeps under the coffee table. And on hard days, when an autoimmune disease is deciding my afternoon for me, I need to lie down somewhere that is not my bed. Being in bed at two in the afternoon does something to my head that the couch does not do.
That last one changed the whole plan. Once I knew this room had to be a place I could lie flat in the middle of the day without it feeling like I had given up, everything got simpler. Deep seating. Something long enough for an adult. Nothing precious. Nothing I would be upset about.
We are shopping for an L-shaped sleeper sectional right now, which is the least romantic sentence I have ever put on this blog and also the most honest one. It sleeps a guest. It holds all four of us. It faces the woodstove.
If you take one thing from this post, take this. Watch your room for a week before you buy anything. You already know how you live in it. You just have not written it down yet.
Buy less furniture, and buy it bigger
The mistake I made in our Chicago apartment was filling rooms. A console here. An accent chair there. A little side table that held exactly one candle and nothing else.
Old houses have a scale to them, and a lot of small furniture fights it. Five little pieces read as a showroom. Three big ones read as a house. This is the part of farmhouse style that nobody puts on a mood board, and it is the part that actually matters.
What is in ours right now:
- One long, deep sofa (soon a sectional)
- A reading chair in the corner with a basket of wool blankets beside it
- A low wooden coffee table with rounded corners, which I chose the month Lochlan started walking
- Two woven baskets, one for toys and one for blankets
- A bookshelf
That is the entire room. There is open floor in the middle of it, which has turned out to be the single most useful thing in a house with a small kid. He needs somewhere to dump everything out. If I had filled that space with a pretty ottoman, I would have moved the pretty ottoman four times a day for a year.
Buy the sofa you will keep. Then stop for a while. I would rather have an empty corner for six months than a chair I bought only because the corner was empty. Every piece in there now got bought slowly, and a few of them came secondhand, which is its own kind of farmhouse anyway. Old houses were never furnished all at once.
Texture is doing all the work
Here is the thing nobody says plainly. Farmhouse is not a color and it is not shiplap. It is texture.
Old houses are full of surfaces that have been touched. Wood worn smooth. Wool. Linen. Stone. Cast iron. Get enough of those into a room and it reads warm even if every single color in it is some version of oatmeal. Miss them, and you can paint the walls the exact right white and it will still feel like a rental.
In ours, that means a heavy linen throw over the back of the sofa, wool blankets in the basket, and my grandmother’s quilt, worn thin in a few places, folded over the arm of the reading chair. There is a jute rug under the coffee table that is rough underfoot and hides absolutely everything. And there is Lochlan’s muslin blanket, which lives on the couch and has never once been put away.
Somewhere in the last two years I stopped matching things. The quilt does not go with the rug. The rug does not go with the sofa. They all go with the house, and the house is the thing you are actually decorating.
One practical note, because this is a real room. Everything soft in there can be washed. That is not a design rule, it is a survival rule, and it is the reason I can say yes to snacks on the couch without hearing myself sigh first. If you want the longer version of how I think about this, I wrote a whole post on making a home feel cozy that gets into the sensory side of it.
Light it low and warm
We turn the overhead light on almost never.
There are three lamps in our living room. One on the side table by the sofa, one on the bookshelf, and a small brass one in the corner that sits on a timer and comes on at dusk without me having to think about it. All warm bulbs. Nothing blue, nothing bright, nothing up at ceiling height.
That is the whole trick, and it is the cheapest change on this list. Light a room at the height of a person sitting down and it feels like evening. Light it from the ceiling and it feels like a waiting room. Which is exactly what ours felt like for two years, and I could never work out why.
In winter the woodstove does the rest of it. There is no lamp on earth that competes with a fire, and I have stopped trying.
The one thing I would skip
Shiplap. And I say that as someone who lives in an actual farmhouse.
It is the first thing people reach for because it is the visual shorthand for the whole style, and in a genuinely old house it usually reads as a costume. Our walls are plaster with a soft wave in them where the house has settled. Covering that with a wood treatment would be hiding the real thing behind a picture of the real thing.
If you want that warmth without the commitment, put actual wood somewhere it belongs instead. A bowl on the table. A stool. An old cutting board leaned against the wall. That was the texture you were after, and it costs eleven dollars at an estate sale.
🛒 A few things I use for this
- Warm 2700K bulbs for every lamp in the room. This is the change I would make first.
- A simple lamp timer so the corner lamp comes on at dusk on its own.
- A real wool throw, heavy enough that it stays where you put it.
- A jute rug, which hides more than any other rug I have owned.
- Big woven baskets, one for blankets and one for toys.
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Where I would start if I were starting over
Lamps first, because they cost the least and change the most. Then the sofa, and only the sofa. Then one good rug. Everything else can wait, and honestly, the waiting is how the room got good. The pieces I bought in a hurry are the ones that are gone now.
The living room stopped feeling like a waiting room the year I stopped decorating it and started furnishing it for the four of us. It still is not finished. There is a wall I have no plan for at all, and a lamp I have never loved. But it is the room we are all in every night now, and that was the entire point of the house.
If your own living room is in the awkward middle right now, that is fine. Mine was for two years. You are allowed to live in a room while you figure it out.
More on the slow version of all this in how to simplify your home, what I did in our bedroom, and why we left the city in the first place.
