It’s very typical for Irish old builds to be dark inside. Only now modern Irish buildings get planned with large windows and vaulted ceilings. But no worries! If room is dark, it doesn’t mean it cannot be cozy. This year I’ve been working with young family in co. Leitrim and our main design brief was “To make room Cozy and Inviting”.  You can see for yourself that room looked a bit dull and mostly because of a lack of natural lighting. 

  Sitting room – BEFORE  

There is a very popular false belief among homeowners – ‘if room is dark you need to choose very light paint colour’. Unfortunately, all light and medium tone paints don’t show much colour in the dark at all. You need to work from the opposite – If you want to see colour, you need to put colour on walls!

 I don’t mean colour as blue, green, red or yellow; I mean rich colour tone of your choice. It can be neutral but with deep base, it won’t make room dark but will add volume.

See picture below, wall colour creates strong contrast next to white ceiling and at the same time it doesn’t make room much darker. Though, we see and feel nice warm tone. 

Sitting room – AFTER 

In addition, we have changed furniture layout to make sure all seats facing centre of the room creating conversational area. It’s very important condition to fulfil making room more inviting.

  Sitting room – AFTER 

This sitting room is a very long room, which was a big struggle for a family to style it in a past. There is a good design tip: Create unique display centering it to each area.  

In our case, it is corner sofa and cuddler sofa as two unique areas withing one large room. We keep the flow of textures and colours not to loose integrity.

Sitting room display – AFTER 

I hope you like transformation and here is one final design tip: To make room to look luxury, Invest into good ceiling light/chandelier and add greenery in glass jars! They are small details but very effective! 

Have a lovely day!

Alena C