Room reveal: our calm, cosy cottage living room

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I’ve shared a few peeks of our living room in recent posts, but today I’m excited to finally reveal the finished space as a whole.

This room appealed to us the moment we viewed our little cottage, as it has two windows and gets lovely light from morning through to evening. But it was also the trickiest space to get right. Not only did it present several layout challenges (more on those below), it had also been stripped of most original features, leaving it looking bland and soulless. Figuring out how to turn it into the calm, cosy living room we wanted took a bit of thought – in fact I spent quite a while mocking up various renderings and floor plans before we even submitted an offer for the house, to ensure we could make it work for us.

Here’s what it looked like on the day we moved in: 

And here’s how we’ve transformed it….

The colour & material palette

The living-room decor reflects the restful, rustic-minimalist mood that we’re aiming for throughout the cottage, with a tonal palette of earthy beiges and browns united by a gentle underlying warmth. The walls, ceiling and woodwork are all painted in Farrow & Ball’s chalky ‘Slipper Satin’, and there are lots of natural materials such as oak, linen and stone.

To add depth and interest to the neutral scheme, I introduced bronze and black accents, as well as a variety of wood tones and some unexpected splashes of stainless steel and chrome. These create elements of contrast, offsetting matt with glossy, smooth with rough, light with dark. And to reflect the cottage setting, there are a few time-worn vintage pieces among the clean-lined Scandinavian designs that I so love.

The layout

The ground-floor rooms in the cottage are arranged so that each leads directly off another, with no hallway between them. We like the sense of flow and connection this provides, but it means the living room essentially acts as a walk-through between the dining room and the kitchen. This left us with the tricky balance of creating a cosy space with a defined function, while also ensuring there’s a clear pathway through it. And the windows, as much as we love them, added further restrictions on how we could lay it out.

Luckily the space is fairly long, with the doors to the dining room and kitchen clustered in one corner. This meant we could set up an inviting seating zone away from the main traffic area, with the furniture slightly pulled out from the windows and anchored by a large rug. The space by the doors hasn’t gone to waste, as we’ve added a slimline console table (which sat in the hallway in our previous house) where we can display books, ceramics and a lamp.

The fireplace & bioethanol stove

The other major issue with the living room was that it lacked a focal point. The original fireplace and chimney breast had long since been removed, leaving the space devoid of features other than a strange niche that we think is the remnant of an old doorway or cupboard (more on what we’ve done with that below).

Our solution was to create a new fireplace, using stud walling to build a false chimney breast. We had a bit of a debate about where this should go, but we eventually settled on the narrower wall at the far end of the room. This means it draws the eye as soon as you enter the space, and it has the added benefit of making the room feel a little squarer and less rectangular.

We then commissioned stonemason Christopher Emery to make a bespoke fireplace out of Bath stone – the material our cottage and most other buildings in the area are constructed from. It’s quarried just down the road in the town of Corsham, and it’s lovely to have something so local – we’ve also discovered that a 19th-century occupant of our house was himself a stonemason and worked in another (now closed) nearby quarry, so it seems very apt! We kept the actual design of the fireplace fairly simple, opting for classic elegance rather than anything ornate.

Within the fireplace is a bioethanol stove, which looks like a traditional wood-burner but uses a renewable plant-based fuel that doesn’t create any smoke, soot or nasty particles. What’s more, it doesn’t need a flue, so it’s ideal for a false chimney breast such as ours.

The flooring

The living room features the same Quick-Step engineered wooden flooring that we’re using throughout the cottage. It’s the ‘Cascada’ range (chosen because it’s waterproof and therefore suitable for the kitchen and bathroom) in the ‘Wintry Forest Oak’ colourway – a pale oak with a subtle white stain that’s neither too cool nor too warm. It has visible knots and variations that seem appropriate for a country cottage, and it’s finished with an extra-matt lacquer for a natural look. It fees wonderfully tactile underfoot, and it comes in wide planks that give the illusion of more space than we actually have. We’ve laid it continuously, with no thresholds between the various rooms, to enhance the sense of flow and lead the eye seamlessly from one space to the next.

The furniture

Sadly neither of the two sofas that we had in our previous living room were the right size for this one, and the larger of the two wouldn’t even have fitted through the narrow doorways. So, the hunt was on for a new one. I really liked the idea of a linen slipcover design to fit with the rustic aesthetic, and IKEA’s three-seater ‘HYLTARP’ model proved ideal. It’s long enough for both of us to sprawl out in comfort and can accommodate four people at a push, giving us roughly the same amount of seating overall as we had before, despite only having space for one sofa in this house. What’s more, it comes as a self-assembly flatpack, so there were no worries about how to get it inside! I also like the fact that the covers are removable, meaning we can take them off to wash them, replace them if they wear out or even change them entirely should we ever fancy a new look. At the moment we have IKEA’s own covers in ‘Gransel Natural’, but when budget allows I’d like to buy some made-to-order ones from Bemz – perhaps one set in pale beige for spring and summer, and another in a warm brown to swap in over autumn and winter.

We’ve paired the sofa with two easy chairs that we had in our previous home – Harry Bertoia’s chrome-framed ‘Diamond’ chair, designed in 1952 and now made by Knoll, and Hans J. Wegner’s oak and paper-cord ‘CH25’ chair, created for Carl Hansen & Søn in 1950. They’re both mid-century modern icons and among my all-time favourite designs, but they couldn’t be more different in terms of materiality and expression. I love the contrast between them, and the slight tension they create with the relaxed linen sofa.

The side tables – a gnarled oak plinth and Audo Copenhagen’s sleek steel-and-marble ‘Androgyne’ table – also came from our previous home, and again I like the contrast they bring. The coffee table is new, though, as our former glass-topped IKEA table had become very scratched and wobbly (not helped by the fact I used to put my feet up on it!). I thought a vintage wooden table would work perfectly, but I wanted one with a shelf for books, magazines and boring things like the TV remote control. I couldn’t find anything suitable, so we decided to order a custom-made table in salvaged timber from The Dancing Woodman, where we also bought the desk for our home office. It has various designs, finishes and dimensions to choose from, and we opted for the ‘Northam’ model in antique oak.

The built-in shelving

We put the niche that I mentioned earlier to good use by installing floating shelves, which Chris built himself using wooden battens and MDF. We painted them to match the walls, and we’re really pleased with the result – it gives the niche a practical function while highlighting it as a feature, and it also adds some visual impact to a fairly empty side of the room.

The shelves now house our collection of novels, and yes, I still display them spine-inwards! I always get comments about this, and I appreciate it’s a love-it-or-hate-it thing, but I mainly do it because I have a neurological condition called synaesthesia (which you can read about here) and find the different colours of the covers jarring and stressful.

The radiator

As I mentioned in the reveal of our dining room, we’ve replaced the tatty 1980s radiators throughout the house with BestHeating’s ‘Milano Windsor’ model – an elegant, pared-back spin on the traditional column radiator, which we’ve paired with beautiful patinated brass valves.

We originally wanted to move the radiator to sit beneath the other window, so that the heat output wouldn’t be blocked by the sofa, but the thick stone walls meant the cost of doing this was huge, so it stayed where it was. As the sofa is pulled out from the wall, it shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

The lighting

We’ve layered the lighting to create a cosy, welcoming ambience, dotting lamps at different heights around the room. Most of them came from our last home, including the Lumina ‘Daphine’ floor lamp and the New Works ‘Tense’ pendant (we rarely switch the latter on, but it acts as a focal point and helps to zone the main seating area). But there are two new additions in the form of a table lamp with a linen shade and a textured stoneware base, and the Audo Copenhagen ‘Reverse’ bronze and travertine lamp from Holloways of Ludlow, which keeps moving between the dining room and living room because I like it in both spaces and can’t decide where it should live permanently!

Most of the lighting is dimmable, meaning we can alter the mood of the room in seconds. There are also lots of candles – an essential for me, as I light them every evening to help me wind down.

The finishing touches

We brought quite a large collection of art with us when we moved house and had fun selecting pieces for the living room. Taking centre stage above the fireplace is my treasured 3D ceramic artwork by Cotswolds potter Tracy Dixon, which used to hang in the dining room in our previous home. Also on display is a black and white horse print from Coco Lapine Design, original sketches by West Country artists such as Veronia Gayle, and a moody abstract landscape from Atelier Printworks, which makes art for awkward spaces such as alcoves.

Textiles include two super-soft alpaca-wool throws from sustainable Danish brand Elvang, semi-sheer linen curtains which pool gently on the floor, and a selection of linen cushions in earthy browns and beiges. I’ve also incorporated one cushion with a faded, almost tapestry-like floral print, adding a hint of traditional country style among the more contemporary designs.

The other accessories are a mix of minimalist Scandinavian pieces (Lind DNA and New Works candleholders, a Cooee Design vase and sculpture, a stainless-steel ‘HK’ pitcher from Georg Jensen), handmade ceramics that I’ve collected over the years, vintage flea-market finds, and wooden pieces made by Chris, who’s a talented amateur wood-turner. They create an appealing mix of shapes, materials and textures, and again feed into the play on contrasts.

So that’s our calm, cosy cottage living room: the final room downstairs to be finished. We’re really pleased with how it’s turned out, and we’d love to know what you think in the comments below. We’ll now be turning our attention to completing the renovations upstairs – more on those in a future post…

All photography by Abi Dare