Pro Designer Creates a Modern Living Room Perfect For Hosting

At this point, I'm just waxing poetically

about drinks and low slung sofas.

Hi, I'm Darren Jett.

I'm an interior designer,

and I am going to show you how to turn your living room

into a conversation pit.

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[gentle music]

So this is Matt and Rhys, and this is their apartment.

Their apartment is already so gorgeous,

but it's just not as functional as they'd like it to be.

All the furniture is just a bit too heavy,

it's a bit too bulky.

It doesn't give the impression of someone

who is really hosting a lot of really cool people,

listening to really good music and staying up way too late.

Currently, there's only four to five seats.

You can get maybe one, two, maybe three people on the sofa,

and you get two in these chairs over here.

It's not a lot of space.

If they have a dinner party of 12 people

and maybe other people show up afterwards,

suddenly everyone's sitting around on the floor.

So what I'd like to do is to solve for that.

[paper tearing] [upbeat music]

One issue is that the seating is too formal,

so I'm going to make it more casual.

Instead of just simply rearranging the furniture,

which granted, would be the easiest thing to do,

it wouldn't really give us what we're trying to achieve.

We could, for instance,

start to have the seating do something like this,

where suddenly the living room really becomes much more

about conversation, but we just don't have enough seats yet.

We're going to repurpose the furniture elsewhere.

We're going to end up with a blank slate.

[pen scratching] Boom, boom, boom.

The plant stays, the plants always stay, always.

So we really want to have more seating.

We really want to create

this sort of conversation pit, sunken living room.

A sunken living room is this very dedicated arrangement

of nothing but seating.

All that really happens here is conversation.

It's talking, it's hanging out.

You're not really necessarily

watching the game or watching TV.

Very 70s, very loose, very hedonistic.

In a house you can certainly dig in

to create a sunken living room.

Matt and Rhys live in a historic townhouse,

they can't dig in,

because we can't technically create a sunken living room,

what we want to do is create, instead,

very defined lines that allude

to entering a separate world within a world.

We would have a modular seating on the left

and modular seating on the right.

This could easily fit 10, 12 people.

What we're going to do is actually have everything

be very low-slung.

If you have furniture that's quite low to the ground,

you're automatically extremely relaxed.

You're leaning back, you're sort of stretched out.

You're very, very comfortable and it's very casual.

Let's get into how dark this apartment is.

Right now, the lighting is not ideal.

Lighting is so paramount for me.

I am a freak about lighting.

I'm a freak about looking good

and also my guest feeling like they're looking good.

If you have a living room

and everyone's sitting down quite low,

why not have a pendant that hangs all the way down

so that when you are sitting down,

everything feels very dramatic.

I see sconces that offset the window to the right.

Should also talk about uplighting.

Uplighting is a tool that's used often

in restaurants, hotels, lobbies,

places that are meant for gathering, for entertaining.

Uplighting is very important in a space

that has a sort of low-slung vibe.

Uplighting would go behind the sofas as well,

on their own switch.

All of these things create an atmosphere that is perfect.

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Currently, the design is not very cohesive.

Pretty recently, Matt moved in

and they find themselves living in Rhys' apartment,

so it's really time to bring their styles together

and have a living room

that really speaks both of their languages.

These guys are very busy people

and they really want to space

that whenever they come into it,

it feels very calm and very relaxing.

I think that if we approach the design

from a very minimalistic aesthetic,

but influence it with some Japanese references,

we might arrive at something that makes everyone very happy.

Think about seating on it to tatami mat.

Suddenly you take something that feels,

in a sketch, very 70s, but you add natural materials

and it completely transports it to a different place.

The blinds are a bit too heavy, they're a bit too dark.

What I'd really like to do

is to create this sort of Japanese lantern effect.

Imagine if we have a Roman shade

made out of a very thin papery linen that comes down.

In the daytime, the whole room would glow,

and at nighttime it would be reflecting

the light that's inside.

To keep the place from feeling at all too cold,

I would like to keep on thinking about all of the wood

that is currently in the house.

Right now,

all of the window frames are this beautiful stripped wood.

I would imagine that this trim molding

up here on the ceiling looks exactly like this

underneath all these layers of paint.

If we can strip all this away,

it would be a big benefit to the project.

It would make the space feel so much warmer,

and it would also really hit home

the fact that these guys have a beautiful living room

with beautiful details are original,

and it's further contrast to what we're creating down below.

This final render,

I'm walking into Matt and Rhys' new living room.

I see in front of me the most beautifully lit space.

I see a low-slung sofa

that really acts as a conversation pit,

a low coffee table with a pendant

that hangs delicately above it.

The overall energy

and vibe of the room is very warm, it's very clean,

it's very minimal, but overall, it's extremely warm,

it's very comfortable.

It's a place that I really want to hang around

and stay in for a while.

And that is Matt and Rhys' redesign.

Do you want advice on your space?

Submit in the description below.

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