Home with Lisa Quinn Episodes
A Modern, Comfortable Living Room
Lisa transforms a dull living room for roommates, Annie and Tiera. Will the new living space live up to the roommates expectations?
by Fabian Scrivani
This week we headed down to San Jose to make over a drab living room for Annie and Tiera. Annie recently purchased a condo and invited her friend Tiera to be her roommate. The girls are fun, outgoing, energetic, and both have a flair for entertaining. They have a very spacious living room with a fireplace, but weren't sure how to pull a look together with their miss-matched furniture. The ladies also have two adorable dogs with whom they share the space, so one of our challenges was making sure most of the surfaces were pet-friendly. We knew it would be fun planning and shopping for the room, so we signed up!
Time to talk wall color. We chose a grassy green with the slightest hint of gray in it so it reads as 'crisp and contemporary.' Annie had recently installed beautiful hardwood floors in a deep honey color that looked even rich with the paint on the walls. Lisa fell in love with an unusual and gorgeous sheep painting she picked up at Zgallerie that has a realist/Damien Hirst vibe in a totally FAB way that was perfect for the space. From these two elements, the idea for a modern English country manor meets trendy pub came about.
Versatile furniture pieces are key for any room, but even more so if you plan to entertain. The foundation of any living room is the sofa, and in this case, we had the space for a large "L" shaped sectional that allowed seating for 6-8 friends. An existing coffee table was a great fit for our design plan and its size made it perfect for playing games and serving food. A wall of metal and glass shelving adds high style and tons of storage for the ladies. We merchandised the shelves with bar ware and decorative accessories, added up-lights for drama, and lined the bottom shelves with board games. A new flat screen television mounted above the fireplace keeps the floor space clear and feeling open. Vintage fruit crates were a great find and add character to the room while providing durable storage. A dartboard rounds out the idea of an English pub and will be super fun for the ladies and their guests to play with.
One of my favorite projects ever on the show was the vintage crate storage up-cycle assemblage we put together for Annie's living room. Lisa had seen some great vintage fruit crates online that were selling very inexpensively and knew we had to have them for the room. I spent an afternoon shopping for them and ended up coming back with not only the crates, but also great stories and a bit of history. Wooden crates were the original cardboard boxes. The three I picked up date from the 1930's-1940's and they were from private dealers specializing in local antiques. The crates definitely had a lot of good years left, so we knew they would be the perfect modular storage solution with a retro vibe. We simply created a vignette with two crates and a piece of artwork Annie already had that double as DVD storage. A third crate acts as a 'cath-all' under the sofa table for the dogs' toys.
