Have a Center Hall Colonial? What do you do with your Formal Living Room?

[Anonymous]

You know the house I'm talking about. You walk in, foyer, stairs ahead of you. A dining room on your left and a formal living room to your right, and a hall in the center. Proceed through hall, you may pass a powder room on your left under the stairs, and in the back of the house is your kitchen and family room.

I'm moving into a house like this and I'm at a loss as to what to do. We're a young family and plan on putting a play room in the basement. I just don't know what to do with the formal living space. If I decide to use it as such I'll have to buy a whole new set of furniture. Any other ideas? What about a "study" or library? Is that too in your face as you walk through the door?

[Anonymous]

We use ours as...a living room. It's not excessively formal but it does not have a TV in it (does have a fireplace). Our house has an office/library and a family room on the first floor already so keeping the living room made sense. We certainly use it when we entertain. We use it pretty frequently in the winter to read/sit by the fire.

[Anonymous]

We took out all walls...madE a super large kitchen that is 2/3s the first level. so just have dinIng room on one side and super long family/living space.

We have rec room downstairs which is more informal couches, tv space then the one upstairs.

I am not a fan if formal spaces that dont get used.

[Anonymous]

I grew up in a house with this layout. I remember the fireplace and three sofas with a large carpet. No muss, no fuss. There was a television in the corner.

That's where we lay when we were sick and home from school. We used the sofa cushions to build forts. My mother made wicked (virgin for us) daquiris whenever there was a football game on (or a Muhammad Ali match, but here I am aging myself!!!)

I remember it quite fondly. It was not formal in any way.

Enjoy!

[Anonymous]

I've lived in houses like this and I really would rather not live in one again, primarily because I've found the formal living room is usually just wasted space. I think its funny how people put huge additions on the back of houses like this, where they actually live, and the "main" part of the house is almost never used. I think your choices are to furnish it in the traditional manner -- couch, coffee table, two chairs in front of the fireplace -- or make it into a room you'll really use. I think lots of shelves with books would be great. I've seen lovely houses with lots of built-in bookcases. If you don't want it to look too much like an office, one thing my parents did with their large living room that really seemed to work was to put in a very nice "library" table. People could sit at it and read the paper, or pay bills, etc, but it didn't look like a desk. It was very useful for parties. I once was in a very elegant house that had a wood-paneled library that looked like it had been moved, wholesale, from a stately home in England. I've always aspired to have a room like that.

I resisted putting a tv in the living room for years, but I finally realized that we never used the room. So I surrendered the family room to the kids for a play room, moved most of the uncomfortable antique seating out of the living room, and got some very nice, but actually comfortable, upholstered chairs with ottomans, and gave into the tv. Now we actually use the room (occasionally -- everyone still wants to hang out in the kitchen). Once the kids get a little bit older, they don't want to hang out with the parents all the time, and its nice to have a comfortable room where adults can gather.

[Anonymous]

Lay on the sofa every night with my dcum addiction. We entertain, read, practice music in the room also.

[Anonymous]

We use ours as a living room too. It's where I go to read when the tv is on in the family room, or where the grownups congregate for wine or coffee when we have friends over and the kids are off playing Wii. My son likes to read there, and I'm hoping soon it'll house a piano. For us, the main distinction is that it is the room without the tv. For some reason it has also become the room in which we play monopoly.

I think the key is to keep the furniture casual if you want to avoid the formal off-putting feel.

[Anonymous]

PP here, I also forgot to mention that it is the designated toy-free zone. Nice to have one room that is always presentable and uncluttered.

[Anonymous]

The one thing I'd suggest to make it a more liveable room is to add lighting. Ours had NO overhead lighting when we moved in. Floor lamps and table lamps were never enough to illuminate the room evenly and took up too much space. We put in sconces on one wall and six cans in the ceiling, all on dimmers. LOVE it now, and it was pretty reasonable (although I don't recall the general range). There is still a lamp on my grandmother's desk in the corner, but I can make it bright enough to read or work on jigsaw puzzles. And we can dim the lights for a soothing after-dinner atmosphere by the fireplace. I'd also consider converting to a gas fireplace, but that's a little tougher than installing lights.

We worked with a decorator at Ethan Allen and received two good pieces of advice. One is that two small sofas/love seats facing each other plus two small easy chairs offer more seating and better conversation grouping than a single sofa with two chairs. The second piece of advice was that a single cushion on a sofa allows for more people to sit on it because no one wants to sit on the crack.

[Anonymous]

ours is a formal living room, but it doesn't get used very much, so I know what you're saying - its not like we have so much extra space we can afford 'occasional' rooms. That said, when DS goes to bed and I want to curl up with a glass of wiine, or if we have company, it is really nice to have an 'adults only' room!

[Anonymous]

I second the posters who suggest that you decorate it in a way in which you can live in it. And I like the rec on keeping it a toy-free zone. We've done both and really enjoy the room.

[Anonymous]

We installed a wood stove in our living room fireplace last fall. This transformed the room from a rarely used area to one where we all hung out because it was the warmest room in house! It really feels like our house got bigger because now we use more of it.

[Anonymous]

I'm writing you from the living room of our 1914 Colonial right now. We use this room -hard-, as it's the biggest single room of the house. It's also gorgeous, thanks to 1914 craftsmanship.

Piano, TV, laptops, the cat's in here with me right now ... reading. Some of DC's toys in bins, but it's not the primary place for them.

But then, I'm old-fashioned and maybe weird. We've passed several times over the years on doing that predictable family-room-in-the-back-open-kitchen-"for entertaining"-that-never-actually-happens thing.

[Anonymous]

Ours is a formal living room, too, that doesn't get used much (just like our dining room, although we may actually use that one more). To the extent the LR does get used, it is because the dog's crate is in there as well as my daughter's piano. I would come up with better uses, OP!

[Anonymous]

Our dining room is just big enough to be a dining room. It's open to the kitchen, but it's not a "great room" by any means. So, the living room is the living room. Tons of bookshelves, comfortable seating, and a TV. It's not a kid-free zone at all, but the bulk of the toys are in the basement, as well as another TV and the kiddie DVD collection and such. Adults spend evenings in the living room, reading or on laptops or watching TV. When the kids are awake, outside of mealtimes, we're often all together in the basement.