While we’ve been spending so much more time at home lately during lockdown - especially in our main living room - I decided to freshen up our sofa, as I felt like it needed a little bit of TLC. Now, I will preface this post by saying we have a lot of big plans for our home (new floors, new kitchen and laundry, repainting walls, replacing furniture, etc) however, we aren’t in any rush, and are tackling jobs one at a time. In the meantime, I am adding smaller styling touches here and there, to inject some personality into our home, and make it feel more like ‘us’. Hence, the sofa update.
First I thought I would share a mock-up I did of the sofa. Being a visual person, I do this sort of thing a lot to get a better idea of the colours, size, and placement of objects. It’s especially useful while we can’t go into stores right now and see things in real life - this allows me to get an idea of how it might look. I also really love seeing before and after images. In the before (above), you will see on the sofa I originally had four standard size cushions (plain), two large cushions (spotted), and two round cushions.
To begin the refresh, I decided to bring two European pillows that had been tucked away in a cupboard down to the sofa. (Being stuck at home 24/7 I’ve also been playing around with what we already have - moving things into different rooms, pulling things out of cupboards, rearranging spaces). Because I couldn’t have all the pillows/cushions on the sofa - now there were ten, there’s no way they would have all fit - I moved three of the standard cushions out to the main bed. This also allowed me to add some interest to that room too.
Once I was happy with the new layout, it was time to replace the white covers! Once upon a time, I liked the simplicity of white covers, but now I like having a bit more colour in my decor accessories - especially as they can easily be updated or moved around.
I experimented with a few different combinations of colours, textures, and patterns. I wanted something that would stand out against the grey/brown sofa, but not contrast too much with the cushions already there.
Doing this I quickly saw that the grey textured cushions, while beautiful, were way too bland. Same for some of the velvet teal blue options; they just looked too plain next to the existing blue velvet cushions. On the other end of the scale, I tried a mustard spot. While I loved the colour and pattern, it stood out a bit too much.
I decided I liked the colours and tones of the teal blue cushions, but not as a solid colour. Being so large, I felt the Euro cushions needed a bit more detail, so I looked for some covers in similar colours, that also had texture or pattern to them.
What I ended up finding was amazing! A cover with four tones of teal blue, in a quilted sun ray design. Even better, the pattern was asymmetric, so would look a little bit different depending on which way you sat the cushions up.
I'm really happy with the result. The addition of another pattern gives the sofa more depth, as originally it was looking very one dimensional with so many plain coloured cushions. And the new shades of blue work so much better in the space than the white.
And if you're interested in any of the cushions/covers I've shared in this post, I've popped the links below under the 'real-life' before/during/after shots.
BEFORE COVERS: Black velvet, blue velvet, large spot, small spot, blue round.
EURO COVERS: White, light grey, dark grey, light teal, dark teal, mustard spot, teal multi.
