Brown Living Rooms

Instead of choosing matchy-matchy pieces, mingle different furniture styles—new with old, modern with tradition, flea-market with high end—to add texture and interest. This living room pairs a club chair with modern seating and vintage Bertoia children's chairs from eBay.

The homeowners built in these low-lying bookshelves in the living room, and painted a few unexpected splashes of yellow and persimmon at the backs. Painting the brick surround instantly brightened the room without compromising the cantilevered cement hearth—one of the original architect's signature designs.

Tone on tone works well in this light brown living room—choose plants saturated in color to add luminosity to blank palettes.

Somehow a tan fringe underskirt on a couch with armrests would look outdated, but remove the arms and voila, a perfectly contemporary couch with a twist.

Earth-toned valances help the room seem less tall and create a cohesive Georgian feel anchored by the brown wooden writer’s desk and adjacent chairs.

When working with expansive uninterrupted wall space, you can turn to a piece of abstract art with accents of the room’s primary color, which draws focus but doesn’t have the confines of creating a theme for the room.

Flecks of gold infuse the swirls of the brown area rug and play up the convex legs of the glass-topped coffee table.

To easily balance out a space, choose a shape and employ it in various ways—here, brown cubes are central to the tiled fireplace, the mirror frames and the checkered rug.

Turn the fireplace into a lounging area by providing front-row seats to the coziest show in the house; and with firewood storage nearby, no one has to get up.