I am working on a really fun project, helping a couple who recently bought a one-bedroom in the Lincoln Center neighborhood of New York City totally redesign the space. They moved to the city from LA without any of their previous furniture and almost no art or other personal home decor. I introduced the home design project last week with the nickname #LivingLaLincolnCenter both to keep the client’s privacy and to be cheesy. They are currently undergoing a renovation that will transform the main rooms of the apartment and turn it into a two-bedroom. The wife, someone I’ve known a long time now, has enlisted me to help her with the design.  Last week, I shared with you the three main design options I had presented for the living room. Want to see the direction she liked the best?

Option 3! She said she liked the colorful yellow chair and colorful blue coffee table. She also really liked the floor pillows I had suggested. As a reminder, between the time she moved into the apartment and I started working with her, she had already purchased the couch, rug and TV console. Resources for all furniture and home decor are in my intro post.

Here’s how the living room looked when I saw it:

Blow up mattress is in the dining room, so you can see how open the entire space is.

#LivingLaLincolnCenter living room

Here’s my suggested layout and design plan:

Here’s Option 3:

And here’s why I like Option 3:

• As you know, I’m not afraid of color.
• I like that the largest items in this room are neutral (the couch and rug) and that there are other neutral elements (the lamp and the TV console).
• I like that there are plenty of curves to balance the straight lines of the mostly modern furniture.
• I like that all the colors go together, and that the blush pink acts as an accent color to tie it into the master bedroom color scheme (see intro post for reference) but it’s also such a soft color that it acts like a neutral.

But so much has changed since I started this project over the summer:

• She bought an entirely different coffee table. It’s a modern, wooden design with a rectangular shape. It’s a good looking table, but this means that I need to inject curves elsewhere.
• The renovation is about to start and she has chosen new flooring.
• As I mentioned, she is adding a second bedroom that will double as her office. It involves moving and adding new walls, one of which will be a full glass panel with doors that open out to the living room, making the wall within that second bedroom a focal point for when you’re sitting in the living room and can see through the glass wall. I know that sounds kind of confusing, but I hope to be able to post progress shots when a lot of the renovation is scheduled to be done in December.
• I had initially thought she wanted to keep the rooms painted the white they were so I didn’t pick out paint color, but now I’m picking out some whites and grays to be painted during the renovation happening over the next month.
• And, lastly, lighting. She found out that her ceilings all are concrete so she can’t totally redo her lighting without there being major issues, which means she had to investigate track lighting options. The benefit in this case is that the mounted tracks carry the wiring instead of having to route the wiring within the cement. We spent an afternoon yesterday at New York Lighting in the Lighting District of New York working with a very helpful man named Ruben who helped us sort out the track lighting. We designed it in the shape of a T to go from the junction box to hang lights over the couch and dining room table and picked out lighting for both rooms. But this new lighting situation does mean that the lighting options for the living room may change a bit.

She has already bought chairs for the dining room, is about to pull the trigger on a dining table and master bed, and I’m on the hunt for other items to complete the dining and bedrooms. I haven’t even introduced you to the rest of the apartment yet but I hope to share with you all that we’re doing and how the renovation turned out and everything else soon.

But, going back to how this post started: What do you think of her choice of Option 3? Weigh in below.

And, to see other client projects, check out #AlohaLittleLady and #ProjectConnecttheDots.