Homes with an open floor plan continue to entice buyers looking for an airy and seamless flow throughout their home. Without heavy room segmentation or tight spaces, life can shift from room to room with ease, while larger focal point decorative pieces can truly shine.
But open concept floor plans are not perfect, as they take some design considerations to turn from accidentally cavernous to intentionally aesthetic. And, perhaps, nowhere in an open concept embodies this more than the transition between a communal living space and your dining room.
Here, we have assembled some of our top tips for how to separate a living room and dining room in an open home layout. Read on to learn about the living room and dining room separation tricks designers use for perfect flow and balance.
One of the core struggles for first-timers working with combined living room and dining room spaces is to shoehorn a hodgepodge of furniture into each space and call it a day. But what might have been ideal for smaller rooms, such as a single sofa or a diminutive round dining table, may look visibly (and perhaps comically) diminished by the larger space of an open home.
Instead of simply trying to “make it work,” consider the scale and impact of each furniture piece you own and whether it suits the space. Items that feel small, need to be awkwardly placed, or otherwise just don’t feel right for combined living and dining room layouts may need to be placed elsewhere in the home or otherwise discarded.
A common hallmark of combined living room and dining room spaces is the airiness they allow in everyday life. But without any obvious visual markers denoting space, those without a trained design eye may find it difficult to determine exactly where a living room ends and a dining room begins. And really, nothing can be more awkward in home décor than muddled room concepts, such as a combined living and dining room layout.
To help establish one space as an ideal for dining and the other for leisure, consider strategically placed furniture pieces to help anchor your activities.
Large statement area rugs, when distinct but coordinating, mark space and tie furniture pieces together. Similarly, dividing furniture such as open shelving or console tables can create a visual barrier that signals, “this is where this space ends.”
One last trick designers often use to establish a separate living and dining room is to position furniture at odds across each room. Placing a sofa with its back to the dining room, for example, or angling a dining table perpendicularly to the living space helps to establish it as distinct and intentionally separate, despite sharing airspace.
One of the biggest mistakes amateur designers use to separate living and dining room spaces in open concept homes is to select a color palette and then send it throughout every space in the home. While this may be fine for traditional homes, open concept homes are saddled with limitless sightlines. And this means if your living room, dining room, and kitchen alike incorporate, say, blue and white stripes, the result is visual redundancy.
To combat this without falling into the trap of creating aesthetically discordant spaces, consider unique yet coordinating color palettes for each space. This helps maintain the living room and dining room separation subtly.
Shared lighting solutions across such a large space won’t just make your space feel dim; it will also create a sense of awkwardness, in which dining and living room spaces are made to feel like it’s borrowing the aura from their neighbor. This only creates the feeling in guests interfering, rather than carrying an energy that invites them to stay and luxuriate.
To help combat this, consider creating layered and distinct lighting schemes for each space. Color temperatures, lumens, and more, alongside the coordinated yet differentiated shape and scale of your lighting, can be altered to establish each space as distinct, intentionally designed, and intended for unique activities.
If you are looking to fill your open space concept home with timeless, beautiful, and unique decorative objects, you will find them at Home Accents II. Our Surfside Beach showroom carries everything you need to create visually stunning and modern home spaces, from the living and dining room to beyond.
And if you are truly struggling to find living and dining room separation ideas, we also offer professional interior design services to customers in our area. This is one of the many ways that Home Accents II offers everything you need to transform your home into a bespoke canvas for your taste and sophistication.