Pro Designer Creates a Modern Living Room Perfect For Hosting

Architectural Digest

Today Architectural Digest welcomes back interior designer Darren Jett for a new edition of Re:Design. Today he is offering his expert advice on how to create a sunken living room space without any construction work.

Transcript

00:00 At this point, I'm just waxing poetically about drinks and low-slung sofas.

00:03 Hi, I'm Darren Jett. I'm an interior designer,

00:06 and I am going to show you how to turn your living room into a conversation pit.

00:09 So this is Matt and Reese, and this is their apartment.

00:19 Their apartment is already so gorgeous, but it's just not as functional as they'd like it to be.

00:24 All the furniture is just a bit too heavy. It's a bit too bulky.

00:27 It doesn't give the impression of someone who is really hosting a lot of really cool people,

00:33 listening to really good music, and, you know, staying up way 'til late.

00:38 Currently, there's only four to five seats.

00:41 You can get maybe one, two, maybe three people on the sofa,

00:46 and you get two in these chairs over here. It's not a lot of space.

00:50 If they have a dinner party of 12 people, and maybe other people show up afterwards,

00:56 suddenly everyone's sitting around on the floor. So what I'd like to do is to solve for that.

01:00 One issue is that the seating is too formal, so I'm going to make it more casual.

01:08 Instead of just simply rearranging the furniture, which, granted, would be the easiest thing to do,

01:13 it wouldn't really give us what we're trying to achieve.

01:16 We could, for instance, start to have the seating do something like this,

01:23 where suddenly the living room really becomes much more about conversation,

01:28 but we just don't have enough seats yet. We're going to repurpose the furniture elsewhere.

01:32 We're going to end up with a blank slate. Boom, boom, boom.

01:36 The plant stays. The plants always stay. Always.

01:40 So we really want to have more seating. We really want to create this sort of

01:45 conversation pit, sunken living room. A sunken living room is this very

01:50 dedicated arrangement of nothing but seating. All you really happens here is conversation.

01:54 It's talking. It's hanging out. You're not really necessarily watching the game or watching TV.

01:59 Very '70s, very louche, very hedonistic. In a house, you can certainly dig in to

02:04 create a sunken living room. Matt and Reese live in a historic townhouse.

02:07 They can't dig in. Because we can't technically create a sunken living room,

02:13 what we want to do is create instead very defined lines that allude to entering a sort of separate

02:21 world within a world, right? We would have a modular seating on the left

02:25 and modular seating on the right. This could easily fit 10, 12 people.

02:30 What we're going to do is actually have everything be very low slung.

02:33 If you have furniture that's quite low to the ground, you're automatically extremely relaxed.

02:38 You're leaning back. You're sort of stretched out. You're very, very comfortable, and it's very

02:44 casual. Let's get into how dark this apartment is. Right now, the lighting is not ideal. Lighting

02:49 is so paramount for me. I'm a freak about lighting. I'm a freak about looking good and also

02:56 my guests feeling like they're looking good. If you have a living room and everyone's sitting

03:01 down quite low, why not have a pendant that hangs all the way down so that when you are sitting down,

03:06 everything feels very dramatic? I see sconces that offset the window to the right.

03:11 We should also talk about uplighting. Uplighting is a tool that's used often in

03:15 restaurants, hotels, lobbies, places that are meant for gathering, for entertaining.

03:20 Uplighting is very important in a space that has a sort of low slung vibe. Uplighting would go

03:26 behind the sofas as well on their own switch. All of these things create an atmosphere that is

03:31 perfect. Currently, the design is not very cohesive. Pretty recently, Matt moved in,

03:37 and they find themselves living in Risa's apartment. So it's really time to bring their

03:42 styles together and have a living room that really speaks both of their languages. These guys are

03:47 very busy people, and they really want a space that whenever they come into it, it feels very

03:52 calm and very relaxing. I think that if we approach the design from a very minimalistic aesthetic,

03:58 but influence it with some Japanese references, we might arrive at something that makes everyone

04:04 very happy. Think about seating on a tatami mat. Suddenly, you take something that feels,

04:08 in a sketch, very 70s, but you add natural materials, and it completely transports it

04:14 to a different place. The blinds are a bit too heavy. They're a bit too dark. What I'd

04:20 really like to do is to create the sort of Japanese lantern effect, right? Imagine if

04:25 we have a Roman shade made out of a very sort of thin papery linen that comes down. In the daytime,

04:33 the whole room would sort of glow, and at nighttime, it would be reflecting the light

04:37 that's inside. To keep the place from feeling at all too cold, I would like to keep on thinking

04:45 about all of the wood that is currently in the house. Right now, all of the window frames are

04:51 this beautiful stripped wood. I would imagine that this trim molding up here on the ceiling

04:56 looks exactly like this underneath all these layers of paint. If we can strip all this away,

05:02 it would be a big benefit to the project. It would make the space feel so much warmer,

05:07 and it would also really hit home the fact that these guys have a beautiful living room

05:13 with beautiful details that are original, and it's further contrast to what we're creating

05:18 down below. This final render, I'm walking into Matt and Risa's new living room. I see in front

05:25 of me the most beautifully lit space. I see a low slung sofa that really acts as a conversation pit,

05:34 a low coffee table with a pendant that hangs delicately above it. The overall energy and

05:40 vibe of the room is very warm. It's very clean. It's very minimal, but overall, it's extremely

05:44 warm. It's very comfortable. It's a place that I really want to hang around and stay in for a while.

05:50 And that is Matt and Risa's redesign. Do you want advice on your space?

05:55 Submit in the description below.

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