Tips Decorating Elegant Living Rooms

Elegance (Only) Looks Easy 

Elegant living rooms display fine design without appearing flashy. And it’s harder than it sounds. This living room in the home of Washington, D.C., designer Skip Sroka reaches the pinnacle of elegant traditional design with gentle curves on the window treatments and furniture. Both chairs and the sofa have beautifully rolled arms as well as subtle curves at the back. The windows are adorned with curved Roman shades in a damask tone-on-tone that underlie simple pleated silk panels. All together, the curves convey a shapely beauty that ties the room together. This is the essence of soft decorating.  The coffered ceiling and quiet palette continue the understated charm.

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Classic Lines

This fireplace view of designer Skip Sroka’s Washington D.C. living room reveals more of his secrets to creating an elegant space. The gold-leaf mirror above the fireplace is ornamented with a Greek-key motif, the grandfather of classic patterns. (Think the opposite of trendy.) The mirror does more than introduce classic lines, however. It also swings out to reveal a flat-screen TV. This kind of cleverly concealed hard-working function provides one more clue to the meaning of elegant decorating. Efficiency. (Apple products’ efficiency makes them the most elegant in their industry. The same rules apply to both interior and industrial design.) The entire fireplace presentation is refined through the symmetrical balance of the mirror between a pair of antique sconces.


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Cozy Repose in the Living Room

A surfeit of square footage thankfully is not essential to an elegant design, as this cozy living room in the Atlanta home of designer Lori Tippins proves. In fact, the human scale of the space contributes to its elegance, for design is as much about how a space lives as it is about how it looks. Here beauty begins with the bones of the room. Pairs of French doors flank a small antique marble fireplace for a full flow of natural light, symmetrical balance, and pleasing proportions. The trumeau above the fireplace is a major player in getting the right proportions, drawing the eye all the way up to the same height as the curtain rods. (It’s also gorgeous!) These, too, are placed high on the walls, nearly a foot above the doors to skim just beneath the extra-thick crown moldings. Decorative elements are few but fine. The pair of floor lamps, for instance, were converted from gilded iron candlesticks. The vertical border on the draperies introduces color and pattern in an exquisitely subtle fashion.

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A Room with Warmth

In New York’s renowned Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse, designer Noel Jeffrey went against trend by allowing the living room’s original dark-stained woodwork to have its say. And it is the language of elegance. By not painting the lovely paneled walls and fireplace, Jeffrey allowed the space to bask in the warmth of the wood’s rich grain. He underscored that warmth with creamy furniture upholsteries, a white rug, and billowy beige silk draperies that ensure a dramatic contrast between dark and light.

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Architectural Elegance

Inspiration for the bright white living room in this Seattle home was the Hamptons house of Diane Keaton in the movie Something’s Gotta Give. That clean, almost effortless look of the movie’s beloved home actually is as sophisticated as it is simple.  As interpreted here, it’s a crispness that emanates from the architecture. A deeply coffered ceiling works in tandem with the careful gridwork of shelving that flanks the fireplace to define the space in bold, linear strokes. Symmetrical balance extends to both the architecture and the clean-lined furniture to impose formal structure on an informal, feel-good style. So just two words to remember: clean-lined and balanced.

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Best of Blues

When sophistication is the design goal for a seaside home, it pays to pause before bathing the living room in blues. “You have to test them to discover the ones that read sophisticated and not silly,” says designer Jack Fhillips, who did precisely that in the living room he designed for the Shippan Designer Showhouse in Stamford, Connecticut. A pale, almost Prussian blue painted on the walls reads as Old World elegant, especially brushing against white-painted dentil crown moldings. A white silk tufted sofa commands the conversation area with a formality that’s made approachable by a pair of comfy blue club chairs.

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A Polished Palette

The large living room in this DC Design House (Washington, D.C.) exudes elegance with a deftly played palette that keeps all parts of the space in harmony. A tasteful mix of icy blue, ivory, yellow, white, and khaki creates the polished look. A large table in front of the fireplace divides the space into two conversation areas, and its yellow-and-white cotton striped skirt introduces a sunny spirit that’s essential for a room so large to feel livable. Matching sisal rugs define both sides of the room, and their Greek-key edges are banded in yellow to plant the palette underfoot.

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Lovely and Light Living Room

Making the right decorating decision sometimes means doing nothing at all. When a living room like the one in this East Hampton house is blessed with beautiful French doors and an abundance of light, a smart designer knows to leave well enough alone: Keep the windows undressed. Designer Larry Laslo did just that. He also enhanced the architecture’s airiness with a monochromatic palette of soft pearl and sand with dark wood accents. elegant living room


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