Make a Great Room Cozier
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Extra large great rooms with soaring cathedral ceilings are popular features in modern homes and while they provide a feeling of spacious, limitless drama, they can present decorating challenges. Because cathedral ceilings can feel like they are beyond human scale, they tend to feel cold and unfriendly. Here are some solutions to make an oversized great room feel a little more personal, warm and welcoming.
Unify with Design Elements
Any room can benefit from unifying elements like repeated colors and designs that pull various elements of the room together. But in an oversized great room with cathedral ceilings you can make the space feel warmer and cozier by unifying design elements. Choose deep dramatic colors that shrink space, like olive green or burgundy. Choose a design, such as the classic fleur-de-lis, to pull a room together. Repeat it in wallpaper and borders, wall art, pillows, and curtain fabrics. Any repeated design has the ability to unify a space because it connects various elements within the room.
Keep in mind that wall art can appear dwarfed by cathedral ceilings so choose oversize canvas or metal art to fill large spaces. Large works of metal art displayed five to seven feet from the floor will bring the room closer to human scale; the same effect can be achieved with architectural grilles or resin friezes in fluted, columnar or scrolled designs.
Furniture and Accents
Scale and balance or keys to good design whether you are working with a small room or an oversized one with cathedral ceilings. Larger oversized furniture will be right at home in a large great room; smaller low profile pieces will look lost and diminutive. Divide and conquer by creating zones within the space: Create a comfortable gathering space around the fireplace and create a secondary focal point on the opposite side of the room with a writing desk flanked with bookshelves or armoire. Accent each grouping with lamps, pillows, side tables, table top art, and wall art and define each zone with area rugs. Breaking a big space into smaller zones makes it more appealing and in proportion to human scale. It also makes a large space more functional.
Accents also need to be in scale with the rest of the room. A soaring fieldstone fireplace calls for a large wall art above the mantle that will not appear dwarfed and insignificant. A large metal art or oversize canvas art can be hung above the mantle and accent the mantle itself with large pieces like oversize glass candle cylinders, tall urns, lush flower arrangements or substantial candlesticks.
Effective Window Treatments
Great rooms with cathedral ceilings often have banks of windows that are stacked vertically and/or horizontally. If you treat a bank of windows as one window you can bring it down to human scale. Blinds or shutters at the lower panes can provide privacy, then use ceiling to floor curtain panels to frame the window. A valance at the top or just below the uppermost bank of windows can also provide a horizontal unifying element.
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