Spring Design Tips

Can you believe it? While we are still in the winter cold for a few more weeks, spring with all its renewal of life and its accompanying joy is right around the corner! Besides taking a page from Marie Kondo for spring cleaning as everyone seems to be doing these days (our souvenir collections DO “spark joy” so they’re staying at our house!), here are some design tips for your home furniture and accents to mark the change of season yet again.

Switch to Bright Colors

Obviously as the hours of daylight lengthen, you want to “let the sunshine in” to brighten your home decor. One way to accomplish this inexpensively is with some accent poufs, rugs, and wall art in your choice of brilliant warm colors such as yellows and even fuchsia or statement-making cool colors such as the green you start to see again as nature renews itself. Ditto changing your bedding to something upbeat, from traditionally feminine floral patterns to bold single colors.

Rotate Your Accent Decorations

Another fun thing to do with your home decor to mark the different times of year is to rotate displays. Now that the holidays have come and gone, your snow globe and sprig of holly can come down for the next several months. Try bringing out your cool vacation and beach souvenirs! To make this easy, you can have both more display space and storage with a fine accent cabinet.

Our Yorktown, VA store and other locations are here to help you get into the spring spirit!

Make Your Too-Large Room Livably Smaller

It’s hard to believe there can be too much of a good thing until you’re faced with it. That goes for a room in your home that seems to have more square footage than you know what to do with! Never fear, dear readers. Hampton Roads’ furniture specialists since 1960 are proud to share with you some designer’s tricks to scale down that behemoth into something more human, a space that’s even intimate if you want.

Smart Furniture Tricks for Instant Coziness

A common rookie design mistake is to manufacture smallness by trying to employ small pieces of furniture in a big space. This backfires because the first thing you notice is all the dead space around them. Actually, if you pick furniture that fits the room’s real proportions well, such as long sofas and consoles, it makes the room appear smaller. Placing the furniture along the walls, as though it were part of the wall, works wonders as well.

Doing the Shrinking-Room Shuffle: Arrangement That’s Magic!

An obvious solution to a too spacious room is to break it up into two or more rooms. Don’t want to bring in the contractor to add walls? No worries. An accent folding partition (room divider) can inexpensively do the same thing while giving you flexibility if you change your mind or your needs for the room shift. Another designer’s tip is simply to treat the room as if the dividing walls were there by clustering furniture for different uses in various spots: sofa and loveseat combo gathered around the TV, bistro counter-height table and chairs in another spot, and so on. How about your whole home bar taking up a third of the floor space? Your eyes will focus on only one section at a time and thus you won’t be overwhelmed by the room anymore.

Light and Color Tricks

A standby for interior designers is light creating the illusion of space. So what do you do when your room’s too big, brick up the windows and light the room with candles? While we’d love to sell you accent candle-holder sets, you don’t need to do anything that drastic. Just choose more subdued, less reflective colors for your room’s palette, from the furniture such as a living room sofa to your area rug. Recommended hues to turn your echo-ey airplane hangar of a room into an inviting space for your friends are charcoal gray, burgundy, deep green, and chocolate brown.

Patterns and Textures That Fill Your Space

Big, striking patterns on your furniture and draperies, again agreeing with the room’s proportions rather than trying to fight them, fills the space visually, scaling down your brain’s impression of it. Good old-fashioned wallpaper works for this too. Another design trick: avoid anything with too much shine such as chrome. Stay away from lacquered wood, for example. Try painted or stained finishes instead. Metal should be dull or wrought-iron. Mirrors in these cases are a no-go.

For home furniture suggestions to fill a room affordably, check out Roberts Furniture & Mattress in Hampton, VA or one of our many other locations.

Reassess and Redress Your Living Room to Be Yourself at Home

As the years pass and your tastes change, it only makes sense to rethink your home decor now and then. Classical motifs that once enamored you in youth may now feel static and overstated; while what was once too avant-garde for you may now in fact complement your style. Pondering all of these heady questions of style and aesthetics, it’s only natural for your mind to drift to your most prized and personal pieces of home decor: your living room furniture. 

A Leather Sofa Changes How You Relax

In many cases, what your living room may be lacking, in both style and function, is comfortable leather sofa seating. Here, your options can feel seemingly endless—but don’t panic! Start out by asking yourself if your space and your furniture is hard-lined or rounded. If in fact your living room decor could do with a helpful injection of curvature, try out an affordable faux leather chair and matching ottoman, for a delicious blend of antique aesthetics, and state-of-the-art durability.  

Picture Yourself and Your Partner on a Brand-New Loveseat

Somewhere, at some point, you’ve undoubtedly thought of cozying up with a special someone on a sleek classic loveseat of your own. In your living room, a new loveseat means giving yourself a shot at elegance, along with a look and feel that’ll ease your mind the second you and your partner are seated. As far as versatility goes, this timeless piece of living room upholstery will fit almost perfectly in any home—softening out edges, and making an afternoon into a truly sensible and memorable experience for yourself and any of your guests.

Look Beyond Upholstery: End Tables to Reframe Your Room

After you’ve reexamined your living room seating, it never hurts to look beyond the ordinary and inquire into suitable end tables to enhance the ‘livability’ of your space. One small, adorable and affordable end table, positioned at the side of your leather sofa, can serve as the ideal spot for a piece of artwork, or even your smartphone. The decorative potential of an occasional table is—in a real sense—almost infinite, so long as you give yourself permission to have fun with decor in your living room. 

Your Local Furniture Store Knows All About Living Room Decor

Whether your Williamsburg, Virginia home or apartment was decorated last year or 5 years ago, do yourself a favor, and think about restyling it with affordable living room furniture from Robert’s Furniture & Mattress.