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!

Small Dining Room Tips and Tricks

Maybe your home is old-school, pre-dating the open-floorplan craze, so you have a maze of small dedicated rooms as a parlor, dining room, den, etc. Or perhaps you’re making the most of apartment or duplex living. Anyway, the challenge this poses is: “How do I make a dining-room setting that’s truly expansive and inviting when I have limited square footage? I want more than a counter or dinette, and I’m out of ideas!” Fear not. We at Roberts have been helping Hampton Roads households like yours pick the perfect dining room furniture since 1960! That practical experience plus some ideas from the interior-design pros inform our blog topic today: to make your small dining room the ideal you’re aiming for.

Corners Are Your Friends

A novel way to carve out a unique dining room space is to take full advantage of a room’s corner. Place a dining bench along each wall, then add a round or square table. If you plan to seat still more people, a smartly designed dining chair or two, depending on your space and table size, will do the job. If you go with the square table, a smaller dining bench or stool that you can push completely under it is a wise option. Finish off your awesome new dining decor with some cool accent pieces, such as reminders of culinary inspirations France and Italy. There’s always the designer’s standby of a wall mirror, not for vanity’s sake but because mirrors both create the illusion of extra space and enhance your room’s light.

Tiny Space? Then Flip Out!

If your apartment is extremely small so you can’t have a dining table, but you want more than a counter ledge with bar stools, interior designers have this fresh take. Remember the Murphy bed or old-time built-in ironing boards? It’s kind of like that: install a table along one wall that flips up when not in use. That way you have all the table space you need plus elegant dining chairs on three sides. Ingenuity for the win!

How About a Booth?

If you have a small rectangular space off one room, that can be your dining room by turning it into a booth. A narrow dining table and two benches or banquettes are all you need, plus you can always augment this with a dining chair to use the end of the table facing out.

For your dining-room furniture needs stop by our Williamsburg, VA store or any of our other locations.

Don’t Miss Out THIS Black Friday on EXTRAORDINARY Deals

We at Roberts Furniture & Mattress know that by now you’ve been inundated with Black Friday Sale announcements. But we’ve got to tell you THIS Black Friday furniture extravaganza is the REAL deal! ONLY the weekend after Thanksgiving at our End of Season Black Friday Sale can you get THESE fantastic furniture bargains.

Black Friday Weekend Deals Too Good to Pass Up

When you need a small chairside table for your drinks, enjoy this doorbuster, a handsome stand in wood, finished in gray or white, ONLY $29. Another with a drawer in distinguished espresso or oak is $89. Get them before they’re gone. Another doorbuster special perfect for the bedroom is our wood-framed oval cheval mirror, just $29.99. Living room reclining furniture in Italian leather has never been THIS easy to get. At all of Roberts’ stores this Black Friday weekend you can have YOUR choice of dual reclining sofa OR console for $899. If all you need is to settle into a relaxing new living recliner, FRIDAY ONLY is your big chance to get one for as low as $149 (no layaway). If you require power to operate your new recliner, Roberts has got something for you too, for only $299. Or sink back into our Black Friday special lift chair, going for an unprecedented $699. Share the relaxation affordably this Black Friday weekend with a stunning 2-piece dual reclining sofa and loveseat set for as low as $799.

Queen bed need replacing? Our trim modern Black Friday weekend special practically GIVES one to you at $169. If you prefer an upholstered tufted queen headboard, swing by one of our stores, where your new bed awaits. Take it home for $299. Don’t settle for a sagging mattress when you can get a new one for as low as $99 for a twin, $139 for queen, and $479 for king.

We at Roberts appreciate the finer points of decor. That’s why this Black Friday weekend you can take home a lovely wood accent table in blue or white for $42, a gleaming white accent credenza table for $99, and, perfect to show and store seasonal mementos, a handsome accent cabinet in your choice of blue, black, or ivory at a record-low $199.

Stunning Furniture Sets Only This Low for the Weekend

Roberts’ End of Season Black Friday Sale includes entire sets to redo a room. Our Bedroom Madness starts with an understated 7-piece queen bedroom set with chest, in black or gray, for $799, up to our deluxe Woodlands Mansions bedroom, including a queen mansion bed, dresser, mirror, and nightstand, which you can take away after this Thanksgiving for an astonishing $1,799. For a new living room look, enjoy sofa and loveseat sets starting at $699 this weekend only. That sectional sofa you’ve always wanted is in Roberts’ stores too, from $999 to $1,199. Now is the time to SAVE!

You’re not done giving thanks, because Roberts Furniture & Mattress is offering Hampton Roads and Winchester households like yours the furniture deals of the season. Stop by our Hampton, VA store or any of our other locations to save BIG this Black Friday weekend ONLY!

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.