New rug and vintage sofa in the living room

New rug and vintage sofa in the living room

• 10.25.2021

Living rooms are tricky. I’ve said it before. There are so many options for what you could do in them so there’s no easy formula like there is with a dining room. It’s not even a sure thing that you want a standard size sofa! What about a sectional, or two face sofas facing each other? With most living rooms there are multiple options so it takes a while of living in them and playing around to find what works best.

More than 3 years into living in our home, we are still figuring ours out. We recently upsized our rug (again) to a 10' x14', which really made a big difference, and got a bold statement vintage sofa that is helping me hone in on some more décor I can bring in here.

I shared about the options I considered for a natural fiber banded rug here. I really like this traditional look, and we have such a large space that a patterned rug just feels like too much. Natural fiber rugs like jute and sisal and seagrass are great for layering with a smaller vintage rug, too. The reason I hadn’t gone bigger in this room before as it is large but long and skinny, so the standard dimensions don’t really fit. (What would be super cool is if I could cut this one down to a custom size and sew the band back on, but I don’t have an industrial strength sewing machine and can’t wrap my head around how I would fit it all on the machine!) So for now we just overlapped it with the fireplace tile. The fireplace isn’t really functional so it works fine! Getting the extra 2.5’ from our 8’6”x 11’6” rug we had in here before has literally made this room bigger in terms of usable space!

I’m still searching for a vintage rug to layer in here because we do want a little extra softness in the main play area, plus with pretty minimal furniture so far it does feel a little bare with just the plain jute rug. 

Once I had a more neutral rug, I felt free to go a little bolder with the sofa. Not even while searching for it, this vintage floral patterned one popped up in my Facebook Marketplace feed. It’s really unique and different, something that I’m always going for these days. The pattern feels a little colonial and I have always loved colonial revival classic design. The red is a beautiful color, but it’s not one that I’ve brought into our home much. (Blue and green are a little easier to decorate with and more common.) But I found some Indian block print cottons with this color red and will be covering the sconce shades with one of them, and maybe doing a pillow I guess with the other. (It’s thin so you can’t really upholster much with it, but I could do a lined pillow probably.) The sofa is also 92" long, super long and can fit our whole family or tall stretched-out me or Jason easily! It’s from Ethan Allen and there’s no date on the tag but the seller thought it was from the 60s, and I could believe it. It’s in incredible shape, though.

I also have a vintage 1995 Ethan Allen chair in here, another bold floral that I just went for. It does not go with a couch! Might put it in our bedroom and I think I have another chair to go here, I just need to cover the seat with something.

Still struggling with the coffee table, and we need some end tables and more lighting in here. This room is still a work in progress but it’s feeling really transformed with the larger rug and bold sofa!

See how our living room has evolved here.