6 Ideas for Casual Family Room Rugs
Rugs are a great place to start building a room design. They help define conversation areas, they can separate functional areas, and they make open-concept floor plans feel more practical. But what if you’re decorating a casual family room? Won’t a rug make it feel formal? Not necessarily. Let’s look at some casual options. Note: This list is primarily intended to give you ideas for creating a casual look. It is not intended as a comprehensive discussion of rug types, construction, quality, and care.
4 Ways to Do Casual Living Room Curtains
Curtains are a great way to introduce color and texture to a room while also giving it more visual height. But what if you’re worried that adding curtains will turn your casual living room into a dark and stuffy Victorian parlor? You also don’t want to fall for the quick fix of putting up cheap, flimsy curtains in a hasty attempt to maintain a casual appearance; this can draw attention to your curtains for all the wrong reasons. So how can you choose curtains for your living room window that look nice and keep a casual vibe at the same time? As a starting point, let’s think of “casual” as simply something that can be a little loose and relaxed. For more specific tips on how to choose casual curtains, read on! (Have a look at my article What Makes a Casual Room? for more ideas for creating casual living spaces.)
5 Ideas for Casual Dining Room Table Decor
Do you have a dining table that looks ready to host a board room meeting and can’t loosen up for pizza night or a chat over coffee? Here are five simple, affordable ideas to help your dining room look less strait-laced.
8 Ideas for Casual Dining Room Wall Decor
When your home has a dedicated dining room, and you live a casual lifestyle, it can feel detached, like a lost room of sorts. So how can you make your dining room look more integrated with the rest of your home? One option is simply to repurpose your dining room for an entirely different function—as a library or a family game room, for example. You can check out a video I made about that here. But if you’re just looking for ways to make your dining room feel less stiff and intimidating, the answer might be to soften the wall space. Dining rooms often have full, blank walls intended for big china hutches to display your wedding presents. When you don’t have the wares to put such a wall to use, what do you do with it? Here are some ideas for casual wall decor that can help make your dining room more inviting.
What Makes a Casual Room?
If you’re creating a casual room, you probably know the descriptions you want to avoid: stiff, formal, stuffy, aloof, cold, delicate, fragile, pretentious. Casual implies a different set of descriptions: relaxed, unassuming, welcoming, warm, sturdy, comfortable. Casual isn’t really a style. It’s a mood. It’s a feeling that nothing has to be perfect. If the pillows get scattered around the room, it’s OK. If books are open around the coffee table, the room isn’t aghast at the unsightly mess. The real question becomes, how can we create a casual room that still looks cohesive and intentional? A room that your parents can walk into and say “Oh, this is so pretty.” And at the same time, a three year old and a dog can run around in it into it and no one gets anxious. A mood is difficult to pin down with guidelines. You can create the same mood in lots of different ways, so guidelines are easily broken. But they’re a place to start. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind until you branch out into your own style to create different moods!
