Establish a Focal Point to Give Your Living Room Some Style

Interior design is a tricky business, but it doesn't have to scare you away from having any design at all or having to empty your bank account to hire an outside designer. There are a few hard and fast rules that will allow you to create an atmosphere of your choosing and a design that compliments your tastes and the abode in which to live.

The most important rule of interior design is that a room must have a focal point. Something that stands out and catches your eye upon first entering. The focal point is usually a feature of the home itself, but it can also be an object that you place in your home as well. Let's use the living room for starters and from there you can expand the same idea to the other rooms of your home.

Do this simple test to find the current focal point of the room. Go outside. Clear your mind. Enter through the front door, and past the foyer if applicable, to the living room. What is the first thing you notice? What steals your attention? In many cases it is the TV. If the TV dominates your attention, try the exercise again. Go back outside. Clear you mind. Enter the living room again and try to think of the TV as invisible. Now what catches your attention?

If you have a fireplace in your living room, it is often the focal point. I lived once in a home where I would not allow a TV because it drew attention away from the wood-burning stove. You may have two or more competing focal points. In the same room as the wood burning stove was a panoramic window with a view of a mountain and city below. I was on a mesa in the high desert overlooking Albuquerque. I had to make a choice on which one I wanted as the focal point. I ended up choosing the wood-burning stove.

The focal point doesn't necessarily have to be a part of the room. If you have a $20,000 60-inch plasma TV on your wall, that could be a viable focal point, if you want to play up your technological prowess. Or, perhaps you have a rare and valuable painting on display in your living room. That could be the focal point as well.

Once you have chosen your focal point, it must be addressed. Everything else in the room should complement the focal point in some way, even if it's by contrast. Choose colors that either mesh well with the focal point, or contrast with it, to bring it to life. In the case of a painting, you would want a slightly contrasting color for your walls, otherwise the painting will blend into the color. But nothing too dramatic.

When you have complimented the focal point, the next step is to hide or play down the competing points. In my case, I simply covered the panoramic window with vertical hanging blinds of a very non-descript color. The blinds hid the view, except for when I wanted to open them. No one pays attention to some closed vertical blinds. If you have your 60-inch plasma TV and a fireplace, and you choose the TV as the focal point, then hide the fireplace with a screen and remove or reduce the mantle. Now it is hardly visible.

By using these simple techniques for creating a focal point, you can give your living room a theme and a sense of style. No matter what you choose as the focal point, it is a conversation piece and something to be remembered by guests. And in any case, it will be much more pleasant to the eyes than a mishmash of unrelated objects and colors. Have fun with the idea and then expand into the other rooms of your home as well. Your bedrooms and kitchen await.