How to Make a Living Room Cozy and Spacious: 5 Helpful Tips

Although we all dream of a large living-room, few are those that have a good idea of what to do with one once they finally get it. There are many examples of this strange paradox, and the result is always a room that feels like a desolate wasteland instead of the homemaker it can become.

Having ample space in your house and not feeling comfortable is a wasted opportunity to make it feel like more of a home. So, to help you avoid such a sorry fate, we have compiled five living room ideas that will help you make it a cozy and welcoming space.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

Filling up a spacious living room logically involves more furniture than a smaller space, which may tempt most people to bring any furniture. However, if you haphazardly dump living room furniture in, you may end up with the visual equivalent of an orchestra where each musician is playing a different tone.

📷 Jennifer

📷 Elsa and Dmitri Cherner

In other words, your furniture needs to communicate with each other in a shared style visually, or your room may feel far too improvised. Remember, there is nothing cozier than harmony. But what does that mean in practical terms?

You may be asking, and the answer is quite simple, try creating a pattern in your living room by repeating things like:

📷 Jennifer

📷 Sabrina

Go Big

As we explained in the topic above, filling up your spacious living room will take more furniture than usual, but there is a small caveat to this. You see, adding layers and details to space helps make it cozier, but filling it with too many small objects is going to make it feel cluttered, negating the size effect.

📷 Erin

The best way to avoid this is by establishing a delicate balance of elements by anchoring your room with a single large piece of furniture. Not only is it going to give your living room a base tone from which all the other elements may be chosen, but it will also help in the overall coziness of the environment.

This anchor can be anything:

📷 Erin

📷 Erin

Separate The Room Into Smaller Zones

One of the best parts of having a large living room is that you are never confined to making it just one thing, opening up a world of opportunities. Your living room can be simultaneously the place for reading, having dinner with your friends, or watching the Superbowl, all at the same time.

📷 Valeria Jacobs

📷 Samantha

All it takes is some creative division through the creative arrangement of your furniture into smaller areas that allow you to make the most out of your spacious living room. It's also a great idea to arrange your chairs into smaller groups to allow a greater intimacy feeling intrinsic to a cozy living space.

Hit The Lights!

When it comes to space and comfort, living room lighting is the single most crucial element for setting the room's overall feel. One of the main perks of a large living room is that you will often have more windows or, in some cases, just one that covers most of the wall. This means that lighting is not going to be a problem throughout most of the day, as you are likely to have sunlight flooding most of the time.

However, as the sun goes down and shadows grow, your cozy living room may start to show its darker corners that undermine the atmosphere of comfort you are going for. In such cases, your center, the ceiling light may prove not to be enough, and you will need secondary, localized lighting to keep the space's comfort level.

📷 Lindsay Nead

A good strategy is to pick two or three lamps of similar shape and position them strategically across the room in areas that tend to get the darkest. We recommend you to put these lights in places where they will be most useful, like reading or conversation areas, making their presence a lot more organic. Another good idea is to work the lighting around your living room curtains so that you know which areas will need more illumination once the sun goes down.

Tactical Blanket Deployment

A living room's design is shaped by the people who will use it; their habits and tastes are what will make it what it is. As we browse the bookshelf, lounge on the couch while watching TV, or play a board game on the floor, we want to feel comfortable and taken in by the environment.

This is why it's important to have an ample supply of blankets, pillows, and soft places to lay while enjoying such a lived-in part of our home.

📷 Eureka

📷 Erin

So, if you want your living room to be a cozy place where the people of your home may feel relaxed, keep strategically placing blankets where they are needed. Doing this also has the added benefit of adding texture and color to the room, adding up to all the little living room updates that make it a truly cozy environment.

If we gave out a final tip on making your living room cozy and spacious, it would be to make that place fully and truly yours. That is to say, there is no need to adhere to a solid set of rules and take the advice we have given as general guiding principles that still allow room for creativity.

So, when planning out how your dreams' living room is going to look like, think first of what would please you and the people who live in your home. Do this, and you will soon realize that the ideas offered here will come naturally and several others you learn through practice.

Let us know in the comments: what do you think makes a living room modern? Do you have any living room plants to recommend? Let’s hear it out!

Author Bio: Kevin is a content writer for about 6 years. He studied Design and Arts at College in Pennsylvania. A fan of home interior design, he has taken it upon himself to spread his love for decorating homes by informing people about his ideas through articles.