This living room was reclaimed after life as a martial arts studio.

For a number of years my client had used this room, which would normally be used as the living room, as a martial arts studio. It was bare of any furniture except for some floor mats where he practiced with a friend or two. When he remarried, he and his wife decided the time had come to return it to use as a living room. Both had a lot of family and friends they wanted to entertain at the holidays and throughout the year.

One of their main requests was to have different seating areas, so that the room could flow between small intimate gatherings and large family affairs. Besides an upright piano and small chest at the corners, there were no other furnishings, giving me a lot of flexibility in designing the room.

Because the room was twice as long as it was wide, I had enough room to design two options for them to choose between. Once we decided on which floor plan worked best for them, I could move on to how the room would actually look.

The house was a lovely older Tudor house with its typical dark wood moldings and trim. Since older houses were usually built with 8-foot high ceilings, the dark crown molding made the room seem smaller than it really was. My first suggestion was that we paint the crown molding the same off-white as the ceiling so that it did not draw your attention. For the walls we selected a pale yellow with a hint of green undertone to keep the space open and airy in feel.

For the upholstery fabrics we used a color palette of creamy off whites, pale grays and greens. Because of having all the seating, I chose fabrics with small design details so that they did not overpower the room. The two chairs flanking the fireplace were a tone-on-tone cream fabric, with slightly darker accent dashed lines as its design.

The love seats and chaise fabrics were a textural pale green with accent pillows of green and gold botanical design. To keep it from being uninteresting, I selected a wide gray and cream strip fabric for the chairs; it was highlighted by the black frame of the chairs.

Underfoot, we settled on bordered sisal area rug so that it fit under all the seating areas and unified the space. Because furniture is typically square or rectangular, I wanted to create some movement in the room: The center round coffee table did the trick. Holding up the St. Cecilia granite top was a custom spiral base of metal in a burnished gold finish. The sturdiness of the curved base was adequate weight to hold the granite without any movement.

Artwork and accessories were kept small in scale to keep the room open in feel and not draw attention to the lower ceiling.

Teal Michel ASID, Interior Design, is a licensed, full-service interior design and remodeling firm, practicing throughout the Carolinas. She has a BS in Fashion Merchandising from Drexel University and and studied interior design at Central Piedmont Community College, where she received an AA in interior design. Teal has received several awards from the Home Builders Association of Charlotte and from the American Society of Interior Design. More information: www.tealmichelasid.com ^[1]