Modern living room furniture – how to transform your living room

 A step-by-step guide to modern furniture for the most used area of your home with sofas and armchairs by Calia Italia.

How do you create a modern living room? If you think your living room needs a makeover, here is a useful guide to make the right changes and transform your living room. This area of the house is in fact the beating heart of every home and it’s the place where we spend our moments of relaxation or where we welcome guests. Above all it’s the visiting card for those who come into your home and so it’s important to take care of every last detail of the furnishing. Naturally you’ll want to follow your own taste as well as the trends and new products proposed by the world of furnishing, which is a sector in constant flux and offers furniture and accessories capable of transforming the look and identity of your living area.

Modern living room furniture: features

Before discussing the sofas and armchairs to include in your living room, let’s see what characteristics a modern living room must have from a structural point of view. First of all, the appropriate dimensions for a living room in line with contemporary taste include a space of at least 25-30 square metres. In particular, open-plan living rooms are the trendiest place to put all the ideas and new products for living room furniture into practice. For example, in a very large space, a sofa in the middle of the room can act as a dividing element between two rooms (such as the kitchen and the living room) creating a harmonious separation and a seamless transition from one area to the other without a break.

The other distinctive element of modern living room furniture is natural light. Brightness strongly characterises the living rooms of the new millennium and for this reason there is a tendency to make maximum use of natural light from another room. One way of doing this is by creating a separating glass element or (in the case of a penthouse or attic) the ideal solution is to add a dormer or skylight. Where it is not possible to opt for any of these solutions, a mirror can always be installed in the living room in order to use the reflective power to increase the light in the living room.

Modern living room furniture: starting from one wall to designing the entire space

Once we have understood how much space we have available and assessed the natural light we can get with the measures listed above, we can think about the living room design we want to create. The first piece of advice is to start with the wall on which the fixed furnishings will be placed, for example the fireplace or the TV set. Generally the best option is the largest wall without openings, but sometimes, when analysing the room it may turn out that we have to make the diametrically opposite choice (i.e. a small wall with openings). There is no single rule! But once we have found where to start, we can begin to think about how to create our modern living room, in which the sofa is the star of course. Here we can indulge ourselves with design lines, colours and varied styles, which go well beyond classicism. Just take a look at Calia Italia’s catalogue and see how the possibilities are truly multiple, always finding the right balance between furnishing taste and practicality.

Modern living room: design and layout

If we have chosen the wall where to place our fixed furniture, we can begin to think seriously about our star – the sofa. In general this piece should be placed opposite the identified wall and there are in fact sofas that are more suitable for watching television or for being placed near the fireplace. You might want to choose a chaise-longe corner sofa or a smaller furnishing accessory to be accompanied by armchairs at the sides or a comfortable footstool. There is no lack of solutions when furnishing a modern living room and Calia Italia offers design models that are also extremely functional, comfortable and ergonomic – making them ideal for everything we want in our living room. 

What are the trends for modern designer furniture in a living room? 2023 brings us a wealth of soft, rounded shapes, such as those of the sofas in the Calia Italia ‘Gourmandise Collection’. One example is the ‘Gianduia’ sofa, which with its generous, rounded volumes, evokes even more than its name – the most envied and desired chocolate and hazelnut cream in all of Italy. 

Another Calia Italia model that stands out for its shapes is the ‘Daisy’ from the ‘Modular Collection’. This sofa has a young and modern soul and is versatile with rounded shapes that are designed to cuddle and pamper.

The second distinguishing feature of modern sofas is their larger size. The search for a day-bed piece of furniture is in fact seeing a definite boom among users and the market is naturally adapting.

Among the latest Calia Italia creations, ‘Sommier’ is a modular sofa with generous dimensions and sculpted shapes that, thanks to its tilting backrests and armrests, increases in size to become a comfortable bed. This sofa also features a peninsula, which is also one of the coolest trends of recent years and 2023 seems to confirm the success of this fashion. Among the Calia Italia models is ‘Venere’, a sofa with an elegant and essential design that is equipped with soft cushions, which in its peninsula version, transforms the living room from a place of pure conversation into a place in which to experience new sensations of comfort.  

From the point of view of shades, trends for modern living room furniture include neutral colours and minimalist design, in which grey, white, beige and dove grey seem to be the most popular for this year. Of course there is no lack of stylistic, daring and extreme colours for those who want to go against the tide. Modern taste in living room furniture is expressed above all on a global level in the search for a new harmony between all elements, including (as described above) the use of space and natural light.

The quest for harmony

A trend that is very much in vogue is that of colour harmonisation. What determines a contemporarily furnished living room today is the search for a perfect balance between fabrics, materials and tones and this is achieved by using a maximum of 3 shades throughout the room. On the basis of the harmonious relationship between the floor, wall and sofa, it is possible to choose the other complementary elements, from artificial light sources to coffee tables, rugs and objects. 

With a Calia Italia sofa you can have a furnishing accessory that will enhance your living room to the fullest. Many models await you in your quest to find the star of your modern living room.