If the kitchen is the heart of the home, then the living room is its soul. But what’s the trick to transforming it from lacklustre to lustrous? Following previous articles in January and April on How to Make Your House a Home and How to Design the Ideal Kitchen, in this instalment , interior designers Architect Paul Cuschieri and Malcolm Abela Sciberras from Rebirth Design Studio share their expert tips on how to make the most of your living room.

People spend so much time at home in their living room. It is a social space, made for relaxing and interacting with loved ones. In fact, a well-designed living room invites all into a social atmosphere that should not skimp on comfort.

Timelessness project: Lighting bounces off the shelves’ back panel, emitting a softer glow than visible light bulbs and fittings.

For many, the living room functions as a front hall of sorts – a transitionary space between the outside world and the home within.

When welcoming guests, your living room makes the first impression. With the right personal touches, you can usher visitors into a positive space that expresses your personality and showcases your life story. By keeping the room versatile, you will have the freedom to set the tone for the rest of your house.

Design an adaptable layout

As a multifunctional room, you probably find that you carry out lots of different activities in your living room. Primarily, it is a family room and entertainment space, but it should also be comfortable and homely enough for you to conduct other tasks too, like playing board games, doing yoga or even working remotely.

Making a living room multifunctional means designing it for its primary use while also catering for secondary uses too. The room’s layout, especially its furniture placement, should help you unwind and also engage in conversation when hosting social gatherings. With your secondary uses in mind, you can plan an integrated design that does not disrupt the space’s functionality.

Even though design briefs differ from client to client, we love a living room with a library or reading nook. Not only do books add character, but they provide a mental refuge from everyday routines, within the physical confines of home. Such nooks are the home’s prime space for indulging the intellect, and the books that line the shelves offer a peek into their owner’s identity.

Unsurprisingly, the living room is often the best room for reading since it makes use of natural light. Our goal is always to blend the reading nook into the living room’s seating area, which should be primarily designed to facilitate social interaction. Instead of making the TV the room’s focal point, we prefer to place two sofas opposite each other with the TV on one end in between, so as to make conversation the room’s focus.

In fact, socially driven design was our inspiration for the project in St Julian’s – which we dubbed Timelessness – that won us an award at the International Property Awards in London recently. For this project, we arranged the seating in an L-shape overlooking the outside view and placed the TV on a stand in the corner.

Welcoming and contemporary: Light wood-effect flooring in the living room sets the tone for warmth and comfort, while wall skirting and panelling add depth and dimension.

Create a balanced composition

When you embrace the versatility of textiles, you open a realm of design possibilities, which is why we love to play with textiles in living spaces.

Following the long periods spent at home during the pandemic, which remain an everyday reality for those who continue to work from home, we foresee a rising trend in the creative use of textures to stimulate the sense of touch and enhance the indoor experience.

For peak functional and design versatility, we like neutral hues especially for sofas and armchairs, often choosing to introduce colour through sheer drapes or other accessories.

We used this approach in our Balluta project, where we kept the curtains white but added a pink sheer underneath – a touch of colour that catches the morning light and creates a warm luminescent glow across the room. This was also a way to introduce feminine elements that contrast well against darker colours in the room, such as the navy-blue armchair. In fact, by combining masculine and feminine sensibilities like this, you can generate a wonderful sense of balance in your living space.

And this idea of balance extends to the indoor-outdoor aesthetic, which is a trend that has become increasingly popular. Plants are a simple and affordable way to effortlessly elevate a living room. They keep you close to nature and create filtered light and movement that you cannot get from furniture or other inanimate design features.

Layer lighting

The living room needs to go from day to night, so artificial lighting is essential. A trick we keep up our sleeves is lighting within open shelves and cabinetry. The light bounces off the shelves’ back panel, emitting a softer glow than visible light bulbs and fittings.

Generally, a ceiling light is needed for practicality, but we place a larger focus on table and floor lamps to create different levels of lighting and, therefore, to make the space more dynamic. Also, yellow light is always warmer than harsh white light.

Our final tip is always to design a living room with living in mind. This is a space you should want to spend time in. It is an extension of your home, not a gallery or museum – so make it your own.

There is no single living room design that caters to everyone because we all have different tastes. Embrace yours, do not be afraid to play around and, most of all, show off your personality.

If you would like some help personalising your dream living room, reach out to Paul and Malcolm at https://rebirth-design.com/ today, and stay tuned for our next article.