How To Make Your Living Room Cosier

When designing your home, it can sometimes be hard to know where to draw the line between design, aesthetic and practicality (we’ll save the question of budget for another day!) But your home is an investment and your interior design should be tailored to your needs as well as your taste. Here at Topps’ we’re very pro #banthebeige and want to help inspire you to decorate your home the way you want to live in it.

When starting from scratch, mood boarding is a great way to find out what you do and don’t like together, simply seeing a single tile isn’t enough, you need to be able to imagine the whole room and how all the components eventually come together. Pinterest is a great tool for starting off your search for those all-important inspirational ideas and then you can hone down on those decisions by finding the actual products you’d like to use; at this stage, create a mood board that shows them in situ and next to each other to start building your picture.

To a certain extent, kitchens and bathrooms are the easiest rooms in the house as the components are more or less the same, it’s only really the style or colour that changes. But a living space like a lounge, dining room or even a home office can be the trickiest to get right as there are so many variables. It’s here then that you need to really think about how you want to use these rooms. We’ll explore the home’s lounge to give you an idea of how to bring together all the different options.

A lot of people start with the furniture but you’re making it harder to dress the rest of the room if you start here, the best place to start is the floor! What are the needs of the space, is it a high traffic area, do you come straight into the lounge from the front door, do you have a working hearth etc.

Mapping out all of these considerations will tell you how practical you need to make the space. A tiled floor is a great option for those that don’t have a hallway, if you love high heels or you have a pet running around; tiles take a lot more wear and tear than any other kind of flooring, have minimal upkeep and don’t scratch!

So now we’ve established that you need a tiled floor, what do you choose? Now is the time to start comparing samples of the styles you like with the furniture you like. As the floor is an investment, whatever type of flooring you choose, it needs to be the right tone and size to suit your desired furniture. Starting with the floor makes choosing furniture a lot easier because more options match than trying to find a particular type of flooring that doesn’t upset your orange couch!

Try and get as many samples as you can and lay them out on the floor in the space you’re going to tile and come in and out throughout the day to see how the light in the room changes the appearance of the tile. Even with nothing else in the room, the lighting can have a massive effect and don’t just think about natural light, get different types of light fittings in there too to get a feel for the night time.

For a traditional look, a wood effect tile is the way to go. It looks and feels like wood flooring but with the benefits of a tile. There are a range of designs, colours and plank widths to choose from depending your taste. Here are a few of our favourites…

If you’re looking for something a little more eclectic or have a more open plan living space then a concrete effect tile can provide a practical yet aesthetically pleasing canvas for the rest of your room.