How to best decorate a compact sitting room

If you are looking for small living room ideas, take inspiration from our gallery of beautiful small space designs to unlock the potential of your compact living room.

When you are redecorating, one of the easiest ways to make a small living room feel more spacious is to inject soft, pastel shades into your design scheme to keep the room warm and inviting. Check out our ideas for living room colour schemes for more inspiration.

Make your own media centre

Free up floor space, from storage units, by creating your own media centre that takes up minimal space. A wall-mounted TV is always going to be the better option for small living rooms. Fix an MDF panel to the wall and mount your TV screen and floating shelves on it, one above and one below if needed. The space saving shelves will allow for storage without taking up too much needed space.

The area underneath the bottom shelf allows for extra storage for items such as slim drawer units or drum storage stools.

Utilise awkward architectural spaces

Does your living room lack space due to awkward rooms proportions? Often with period properties the features which we love the most, such as bay windows, present logistical nightmares for laying out furniture. Use the space to your advantage. If you have a small-scale Sofa it should fit neatly into the position, without taking up valuable floor space.

Alternatively use the awkward area to house larger, bulkier furniture pieces such as sideboards and TV units. This prevents the pieces overpowering the rest of the petite room, because the space would be otherwise unused anyway.

Add storage near the ceiling

You might not even have spotted it at first glance, but this owner has mounted some carefully camouflaged white storage units at the top of the living room walls, where any clutter can be stashed away. Off-the-shelf kitchen wall cabinets are ideal for this, if you plan to do the same, be very to careful the maximum load that each unit can take when wall mounted – you don`t want everything crashing down on your head, after all.

She`s also stuck to furniture in simple shapes for a clutter-free look. Go for occasional tables with cut-away sides that reveal more floor space and trick the eye into believing the room is larger than it really is.