A living area, whether it’s a separate lounge room or an open-plan space, should be a place where you feel completely at ease

The lounge room, more commonly referred to as the living room, is usually the most public room of the house. It’s that part of the home where your sense of style is declared for all to see and your most prized art works or collectables are on show. Today, the lounge/living room is also typically divided into a number of individual ‘activity areas’, enabling the room to be used for more than one function at the same time — or for different purposes on different occasions.

The considerations of children, budget and lifestyle are all extremely prevalent here, as are the decorating concerns of selecting a style and colour palette to suit the nature and locale of the home, the co-ordination of new pieces with existing furnishings and accessories, the arranging of the room around a particular point of focus, and the creation of a space that facilitates easy traffic flow. Over the years, our general concept and definition of what a lounge or living room should be has evolved considerably. Once upon a time, the lounge room was saved for ‘best’. It was where we entertained guests and woe betide any child who snuck in and messed things up. With dwindling house sizes (which meant fewer rooms) and the slow breakdown of rigid social conventions, partially spurred on by the advent of television, the lounge room became more of a living room where the family gathered to watch the box during the week and entertain guests on the weekend.

While some homes still have lounge rooms that are used only for special occasions — not unlike the Victorian notion of the formal parlour — most of us tend to use our lounge rooms on a daily basis. Regarded more as a living room, the modern-day lounge room is a more practical and comfortable place than in years gone by. This is probably even so in larger houses which offer the opportunity to create a series of specially designated living rooms, including a lounge room, a family room, even a home entertainment room.

Part of the reason for the more relaxed approach to using — and decorating — the lounge/living room is the prevalence of open-plan house designs. When living spaces have to flow one into the other, a less formal approach to design and decoration is often called for, but this doesn’t prevent you from clearly defining each space through furniture layout or the use of decorative elements like rugs and screens.

It really doesn’t matter, however, whether your lounge/living area is a separate room all its own or a section of a larger space — the arrangements of furnishings, the lighting, the style of the window treatments, the flooring, the artworks on the walls are all part and parcel of creating a living space where you can feel totally at ease, and which you can be proud of when guests come to call.

With open-plan living so prevalent, even necessary in some apartments where the kitchen, dining and living areas have no choice but to be connected, this needs to be taken into consideration when decorating. An open-plan design creates a more informal way of living. The cook in the family can talk to guests gathered in the lounge area while preparing a meal and you can keep an eye on what the children are watching on television. The downside is that you have to consider issues like privacy and noise. With open-plan living, the whole family is together — all the time!

This means the living area needs to cater for everyone’s needs and interests. And today, one of the biggest decisions is what kind of media system to incorporate into the home’s main living space and how to make sure it isn’t too visually intrusive. Of course, the same applies to dedicated lounge or living rooms; you don’t want a massive television or movie screen dwarfing the space and metallic boxes and cabling taking over.

The components you choose for your entertainment system, whether it’s just a television or an ‘all bells and whistles’ home theatre setup, will affect design of the room and how you decorate it. In a new building or renovation, you have the option of having the screen built in or you can buy television cabinets that hide everything away when the system is not in use. You can also have flat-screen monitors hung on the wall which can work as long as it’s not the focal point of the room. You also need to consider things like how much space all the equipment will take up and how much of it will need to be on show — for example, surround systems come with a number of speakers, which all need to be discreetly worked in to the decorating scheme of the room. Having a media system in the lounge or living area may impact on materials you choose for the walls and flooring, especially if you want to get the best from that theatre-quality sound system you’ve invested in. You should discuss issues of acoustics with your home theatre specialist or interior designer, but you might find that you need to incorporate a selection of soundabsorbing materials (such as carpet) and sound-reflecting materials (such as timber flooring) into your new décor. Because a living area or lounge room is typically for private use and public consumption, the challenge for the decorator is to strike just the perfect balance between personal comfort and practicality and the desire to make a strong design statement. As with any room, the key to success is in creating the right interplay of colours, patterns and textures and in selecting, then carrying through to its logical conclusion, a cohesive decorating style.