Create a Seaside Living Room

To give your living room a beach home feel, the colours you choose are really important.  Many true beach houses have lots of natural looking furniture and big windows that allow a lot of natural daylight to flood into the room. Keep the theme of light and airy by removing heavy weight curtains from the windows and hang white muslin material instead.

Decide whether you’ll put the colours of the seaside on your walls or use the furniture to pick out colours like aqua blue and sea greens. Fabric sofas that have white cushions make an excellent choice for a beach themed room. Hunt around online for the kind of thing you are looking for, or visit one of the many sofa sales that seem to be on pretty much permanently these days.

You can make a feature wall using sea glass. Sea glass is the glass you’ll find on any beach that has been smoothed to a pebble like quality by the waves.  It comes in all different colours, and you can collect enough to cover a section of your wall in a mosaic-like pattern. If that feels too permanent, you can always do the same kind of thing on smaller scale around picture frames or mirrors.

Often the best choice for flooring is painted white wooden boards, increasing the light in the room.

Whenever you’re at the seaside look out for natural ornaments for your beach themed living room. Seashells and driftwood are easy to find, and you can bring some home every time you go to the beach.

Decorate your living room with seashells. Fill vases with small ones of different shapes and colours.  Alternate the layers of shells with sand layers about 2 inches thick.  You can string shells across the fireplace mantle and over the doors. Depending on how far you want to take the seaside theme, you could hang a fisherman’s net across the ceiling and put a few things like glass coloured balls and shells to hang from it.

Now all you’ll need to complete the seaside theme is a soothing ‘waves and whales’ CD playing in the background.

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