Creating at least one minimalist room in your home is a great way to get started on this journey. Today, we want to help you by providing tips on how to create a minimalist living room in your mobile home.
Let’s start by looking at why your living room is a good candidate for a minimalist living space.
Why create a minimal living room?
Why the living room is a good room to redecorate
- It’s a good room to experiment with: If you just got into the minimal living trend, the living room is a good room to experiment with. Your bedroom is a very intimate space and you don’t want to mess with it if the result is going to make you feel uncomfortable in any way. Also, it’s where you can most likely get comments from your visitors. There are also plenty of minimal living room ideas available online.
- It’s where your family members spend a lot of their free time: A minimalist home is supposed to relieve your stress and anxiety and provide you with a relaxing space to unwind in. What better room for this purpose than your living room?
- It’s where you entertain: What better room to redecorate than the room your guests are most likely to see and spend time in? Minimalism is very much in style right now so you definitely should show off your new minimal room once it’s completed.
- It easily gets cluttered: Because we spend so much time there, a living room often gets cluttered by things like remotes, electronics, and junk. Creating a minimalist living room will help you find smart solutions for these. And keep it clean in the future.
How to make a minimalist living room in 5 steps
#1 Prep the room
Before you start designing a minimal living space, there are some steps you should do before to prepare the room and make the process much easier and less frustrating.
- Declutter the room: Living a more minimal lifestyle largely means getting along with less. You should start any kind of minimalist renovation with a good decluttering. Identify anything you don’t need or use and get rid of it. Target duplicate items as well as those unused magazines that have been on your coffee stand the last 3 years.
- Deep clean the room: This is recommended as a positive step towards maintaining the hygiene of your home. It’ll also confirm your commitment to the new lifestyle change. Nothing says “shrug off the old and embrace the new” like a good deep clean.
- Clear the room (optional): You don’t have to do this, but it will give you a much better idea of the available space. Actually seeing how the free space disappears will make you think twice about cluttering the room.
#2 Paint your space
Whenever renovating or redecorating your home or a room, painting the space is always the best place to start. Not only will the paint probably cover most of the visible area, but it will really set the tone for the rest of your room. Even though painting is such a basic part of the design process, everything else will need to be done with your paint job in mind.
When it comes to choosing a paint color for your walls, ceiling, and floors, a general rule is that you can’t go wrong with light colors. Really light colors like ash grey, white (pure or off), beige, and light blue are all prime options. The reason you want to make extensive use of light colors is that they stretch the space and make it appear much larger than it is. This helps make the room appear much less cluttered.
You can also make use of a lot of dark colors, but the key is that the colors must be relatively simple. If you use dark colors, they should not encompass most of the surface area. One thing you can do is pair a dark-colored floor with light walls or a ceiling. You can also use a darker carpet instead of an actual dark floor. Good colors for the floor would be black or various shades of wood.
If you go with darker wall colors, like a mid-hue blue, you could paint accents like your window frames or wall strips white. However, it’s very important that you don’t paint the main surfaces white and the accents dark. This will immediately make the room shrink and feel more “busy.”
We say this a lot, but there are really no set rules that you have to stick with. As much as it’s a minimal space, it’s also your space and it’s all for nothing if it doesn’t go down well with you.
#3 Choose your decor
Decor is one area where you can really start to be creative. To lessen the cluttered-effect, use decor in contrasting colors to the rest of the room. This will open up the area, as the decor acts as a focal point for the eye. The key is to not overuse these contrasting focal points.
If you use decor items with more earthy tones or patterns, you can incorporate a lot more of it. Once again, it comes down to experimenting with the colors you have chosen to see what fits. If you choose decor that completely disappears into the surrounding colors, it will make the room feel empty and stark.
Here are some decor items you can consider:
- Simple potted plants.
- Earthen ceramics.
- Lamps. You can either create contrast with one or two well-placed colorful lamps or earthy lamps with light lampshades.
- Throw rugs.
#4 Select your furniture
Once again, you should look at your room colors before you choose your furniture. Matching your furniture the color of your room is probably the most important one of these steps. Furniture makes up the biggest objects within a room and plays an important role from a visual and functional standpoint.
If you have darker or earthier walls and floors, you want to pick lighter furniture. This is to prevent the room from becoming too dark as a whole. If the ceiling consists of a light color (as it should if your walls and floor are darker) then you should match the furniture to the ceiling for a harmonious composition.
If the room is light, you basically have free reign to choose whatever color furniture you like. It’s up to you to match colors. Here is where it pays to take some time and look at examples of minimal rooms online to see what works and what doesn’t.
You should proceed with caution if you’re thinking of picking colorful furniture. It’s very easy to completely upset the balance of the room, but you can create some interesting effects.
However, safe bets are to go with either earthy furniture that is darker than the rest of the room to create a soft contrast or use lightly-colored furniture that’s a different color. For example, matching light blue or beige walls with white furniture. Darker grey furniture that borders on lead or slate will also work well with very light walls.
#5 Add storage
In general, you don’t want to use your minimalist room for any kind of storage. In fact, as part of the decluttering process we mentioned above, you should try and find other permanent places to store anything not needed in that room.
Living space is not as plentiful in a mobile home as in most stick-built homes so you should make sure that you use the available space smartly and efficiently.
Minimalist storage
Many of us love to have some of our books or photos of loved ones proudly displayed in our living areas. And for that, there are some very nifty (and very attractive) storage solutions available.
- Floating shelves: These types of storage surfaces are definitely minimalist in appearance and are an ever-present feature of minimalist spaces. They are called “floating” shelves because they seem to magically float perpendicularly to the wall without any supports. Here you can find some examples.
- Ottoman chests: Another very popular decor item, you can now find useful versions of these that have storage space on the inside and where the seating on top is the lid. Here are some examples. These definitely don’t let any space go to waste.
- Coffee tables with storage space: You can find coffee tables for your living room that come with space-friendly storage solutions. A living room is often overrun with TV remotes, magazines, and electronics which isn’t conducive to a minimal environment and can be stored in such a place to still be easily accessible without getting out of your favorite chair.
This article from Buzzfeed has some other creative ideas to solve your storage problems in a minimalist way.
Entertaining in your new minimalist living room
Many people are concerned that when going minimalist, the room has to be boring and stark. Which leaves them with the obvious question: “How can you entertain in a minimalist room?”
We hope that through instructions we’ve given above, you’ve already seen that a minimalist room can be great for guests. There are plenty of ways that you can add fun elements to a room. Some of the things we recommend, like floating shelves and ottomans with storage, certainly aren’t boring at all! Your new minimalist room might just be a conversation starter by itself. Here are some tips for entertaining.
Get minimalist furniture and accessories
Handy storage solutions allow you to store board games, drinks, etc. within easy reach without it cluttering up the room. The things that you do choose to display should be interesting and spark conversation, such as the books you are currently reading, for example.
One of the great things about a minimalist space is that, when done right, it should make the most of the available space. Mobile home owners are almost always concerned whether they have enough space to properly entertain guests. A minimal room not only makes the space appear roomier but also allows for better flow of movement through it.
Another tip is to keep some pillows or blankets around that can be used to sit on the floor. This creates a cozy and informal feel while helping you minimize the pieces of furniture in the room. They a can either be throw pillows placed sparingly on the couches or chairs or blankets draped over the couch. Again, don’t overdo it with these and rather store them away if they threaten to become overwhelming.
Lighting is also very important. Table lamps are very popular, but can easily start to become annoying if they take up all the space on your coffee tables. Creative lighting solutions like lining eaves with lights or using thin standing lamps that fit perfectly into corners are fantastic options. Disappearing lamps might be a bit pricey, but are definitely minimalist and pack a “wow” factor.
Create entertainment “zones”
As your space is probably limited try to establish a single focal point around which you entertain. Finding out exactly how you are most likely to entertain will help a lot. For example, if you like to host board game parties, center the room around a coffee table where you would place the board game.
If you have a larger room, you can split it into various zones where people can talk in intimate groups without disturbing one another. It all depends on your space and what you are aiming for.
This article contains some great tips to throw a party in a minimalist space. That can be applied to almost any room.
Get inspired with your minimalist living room!
We hope that this really helps you when you start to plan and implement your minimalist living room. A well-designed minimalist living room can be a fantastic place to live as well as to entertain. The key is to really do some research and find examples to inspire you along the way. Live more with less!
