A Place For Your Seat: Using Chairs in Home Design
Furniture can make or break the design of a room. Most of us realize this and do a great job of focusing on the selection of certain big items of furniture. We carefully choose our beds and sofas and entertainment centers to set the tone of our rooms. However, many of us neglect to consider chairs in our home design.
Sure, we do try to choose chairs that compliment the rest of our decor. That's fine and dandy. But some chairs really stand out on their own and deserve to be highlighted as the centerpiece of a room rather than languishing quietly in the shadow of other furniture.
Choosing a great chair means considering its function as well as its form. A chair can be used for rest, for dining, for work, for entertaining ... the chairs that we choose should serve their purpose well. They should also be shaped and colored in a way that makes them attractive to the eye.
A chair could be just a seat. But why have just a seat in your home when you could have so much more?!
Sure, we do try to choose chairs that compliment the rest of our decor. That's fine and dandy. But some chairs really stand out on their own and deserve to be highlighted as the centerpiece of a room rather than languishing quietly in the shadow of other furniture.
Choosing a great chair means considering its function as well as its form. A chair can be used for rest, for dining, for work, for entertaining ... the chairs that we choose should serve their purpose well. They should also be shaped and colored in a way that makes them attractive to the eye.
A chair could be just a seat. But why have just a seat in your home when you could have so much more?!
Slow Chair : Vitra.com
This modern chair is a terrific example of how a piece of furniture can be functional at the same time that it can be a terrific piece of art. The low-slung design of this seat just beckons you to come rest here. The materials used and the unique shape of the chair really make a statement. This chair is bold enough to serve as the centerpiece of a room's design but muted enough to compliment other furniture as well.
I would love to have these chairs in my office! They serve the function of offering seating space to clients or guests in the home office. However, the pop of color on those cute stripes really suggests a flirtiness that you don't typically see in office chairs. These are great chairs for the kind of at-home business that always acts professionally but never takes itself too seriously!
The thing that I love here is that these chairs are complimented by the art work that hangs on the wall here. They look like the kind of chairs that you wouldn't use all that often but you might sit there to sketch for awhile by the window and you'd certainly fill those seats with guests when entertaining in your home. The modern style doesn't suggest comfort so much as an artsy edge which is perfect for a chair serving this type of function.
Here is another example of a modern, artsy chair but one that appears to be much more comfortable and designed for daily use. I can absolutely see curling up with a book in this green chair in front of the fireplace! The color makes the piece stand out; the fact that the color is repeated in some of the other design touches here shows that the chair is really considered to be a centerpiece of this room.
Here's a chair that seems like it could be really versatile in its use and yet would easily stand out as the key feature in a room's design. i can see putting this in the corner of a living room that was decorated with colors matching the stripes. I can also see putting it in a sewing room filled with fabrics. The colors of the lamp and table in this picture show how colors could be pulled from the stripes and used as the basis for a room's design no matter what the room itself was.
I love this little chair just because it is so unique its shape and size. I probably wouldn't use it with a desk like it's used here unless the desk was smaller and more modern. Instead, I might put it at a small table with a phone and a notepad. Alternatively, I could see using several of these together to create a salon-style conversation area in a corner of a living room. That really cool lamp would go well in an area like that as well!
Don't these chairs almost look like they have a life of their own? They just exude a stately kind of personality. If I wanted to put together a room that suggested opulence, I would make rich chairs like this a center of that design! A table with a selection of newspapers on it seems like it would be fitting here.
Now here is a chair that is neutral in color but not at all boring. The strange porportions here (a thick bottom cushion, a short back) along with the rounded style of the chair provide a look that causes you to do a double-take without overwhelming you in any way. The layout here shows how you can have other eye-catching pieces in the room - the long seating area, the curtains - without taking anything away from the chair. And doesn't it look comfy?!
This chair looks so comfortable that at first glance I thought it was some kind of bed! With the plush fabric and the added foot stool, it looks like a great place to catnap. It doesn't have to stand out in design - just that simple white will do - because it excels in the area of simple comfort.
There are two different types of chairs to look at in this modern living room and they compliment each other well. On the one hand, you've got the big statement-making chairs to the right of the room. On the other hand, you've got the quieter but much cooler recliner on the left. Which one you enjoy depends on what you're doing at the moment but both stand out more than anything else in the space.
If I ever get really good at making chairs the center of my design, I want to put together something like this. First of all, you've got the two completely different but absolutely complimentary chairs in the foreground of the photo. Then you've got the dining room table chairs which are each a different color and set that part of the space off on their own. And finally you've got the bar stools which create another seating area that serves a third purpose of the space. What a great combination of design elements all established just by the seating chosen for the room.