One possibility would be to swap the living room and the dining room. Since the current living room is larger than the current dining room you could still keep some comfortable seating (couch and upholstered chairs?) against the front wall for a keeping room/dining concept. Then your new dining areas (kitchen and dining room) and living areas (living and drawing room) would have good flow between them, which would work well both for family and entertaining. You could also add some builtin bookshelves in the drawing room or new living room to create a library area to add another fun element to the living areas. These bookshelves could be against the long walls in the drawing room, around the window with a window seat in the living room (former dining room), or built to create some separation in the open area between the drawing room and living room/stair area. Your plan seems to show some sort of builtin there, but I'm not sure what it is.

i would say, choose a theme just for that space and work around it! for example: maybe "asian" theme! paint the back wall RED or ORANGE, have a piece of buddha statue on the top most rack, you can use one shelve to just hold books with some decorative book ends, and instead of the chair, you can use the asian trunck boxes (if you google for asian trunks, you can see what i am talking about! - look for square boxes), this way, you can also tuck those boxes under the desk/shelf when not in use and the trunk could also be a storage for your files - you can also place a floor vase with some bamboo sticks - the asian theme would really work here as your wood is black/brown this would also turn out to be a peaceful writing space - enjoy!

Thanks for the picture. My friend from Palakkad emailed to confirm that a charupadi is "the sitting area in the entrance (Poomukham) of the house that looks like a bench". The teak is fabulous. My friend also writes that "new buildings are trying to copy the architecture of the heritage buildings in concrete. It is not the same feel". I love teak....in older hotels in Burma the floors were teak and I used to walk in my bare feet...wonderful!!!!

The places I'd actually put a fridge: 1) The main one in the kitchen for everyday use. 2) a spare in the basement near the TV room for snacks & drinks when people come over to watch a game or teens are hanging out. Also used as extra storage when buying things in bulk or when preparing Thanksgiving dinner. 3) possibly a spare in the garage for drinks when I'm working outside and don't want to track dirt/grass into the house from the garden. 4) a small one in the dorm room at boarding school or college.