I love decorating modern living spaces. There’s something unique about them – part sophisticated, part minimal, and just a little bit playful – that makes modern spaces really fun to work with. Plus, much of modern furniture design throws convention out the window, which often gives you much more room to get creative with your furnishings. Modern living room furniture – especially sofas, chairs, and sectionals – are unique and stylish as well as functional. They’re easy to customize, and are fashion forward, fun, and just a little futuristic all in one.
Take this Bender living room set from Zuo. Combining a solid slate gray with silver metallic threading, this set is both industrial and eye-catching, perfect for a cool, minimal design but full of all the warm plush you want to actually, you know, sit on. What’s really nice about this set, though, is right in the name – both the Sofa and the Arm Chair have bent, folded backs that add a little curve (and a little extra cushion) to your design, and fully height and angle adjustable arms for a comfortable fit (and a really awesome silhouette).
Choosing the right modern living room furniture can be difficult, though. While modern sofas and loveseats run the gamut from ornate, funky and futuristic pieces to simple and starkly minimal, if you want a unified design you need to find furniture that will fit with the rest of your decor. This Button living room set has a pattern that’s easy to match and fairly common in modern furniture – simple, dimpled leather squares with an overall very geometric shape. The leather has a slightly old world feel to it, but the shape of the Sofa, Love Seat, Arm Chair, and Ottoman are all modern and easy to accessorize or match with other pieces, and are available in both black and white to match almost any setting.
Matching materials and patterns is one of the easiest ways to find a modern living room set that will fit well with your existing decor. White and black leather are ubiquitous in modern design, but this Fortress modern living room set takes it a step further, banding the Sofa, Love Seat, and Arm Chair with thin chrome tubing. Not only does that make it easy to match with just about any chrome-legged coffee table, it also adds strong lines to the room, making it seem wider as your eye is drawn from one line to the next.
What I really love about modern living room furniture, though, is that the simplicity of a minimal design actually opens up a lot of room for creativity. More often than not, you can find modern living room furniture in modular sets – essentially sectionals, but typically in smaller building blocks than your average corner sofa. This Bond modern living room set is a great, fairly simple example, with a two-tone leatherette structure and small, single-seat building blocks. Each piece is purchased separately – a Middle Chair, Chaise, Ottoman, and Swivel Chair – but they all fit seamlessly together, so you can tailor your personal set to exactly the space and style you need.
Going a modular route for your modern living room furniture not only gives you the flexibility to fit and fill just about any space. It also affords the ability to host a whole lot more people in the same amount of space. Because each piece fits snugly together (and, importantly, without the interference of chair arms), you can easily seat more people per piece of furniture comfortably than you could with regular living room furniture. And because corner pieces fit easily into awkward spaces, but are just as comfortable to sit in, you can make more usable space out of what you have. This Circus modern living room set is a great example,with three different chair sizes (Single Seat, Love Seat, and Sofa) plus a Corner Chair to connect them as you please to get a fixture that’s as wide in any direction as you need.
The corollary to modular modern living room furniture fitting together well is that they’re also easy to break apart, and easy to rearrange. If you’re the type that’s never quite satisfied with a single furniture configuration, a modular modern living room set like this Carnival collection is an excellent choice. Not only can you buy whichever sized or shaped pieces you need, but you can always add on later – and rearrange whenever you want. Whether you want a conventional L-shaped sofa sectional, individual matching pieces spread throughout your room, or something a little more imaginative, a flexible set like this one, with a Sofa, Single Seat, Love Seat, Corner Chair, and Ottoman makes it supremely easy to decorate and redecorate as you see fit.
Modular doesn’t even necessarily refer to the flexible assembly of the set – it can refer to the individual pieces of furniture themselves. This Tsutsumi Lounge from EuroStyle is a set made of three pieces: a chair, an ottoman, and a side table. With one of each, it makes a heck of a recliner. More than that and you can build an entire modern living room sectional set with three easily interchangeable pieces. The table has a removable piece in the center which creates a nice space to store magazines, books, or remotes, but when pressed against other pieces makes a seamless seating and can extend the length of your sofa. You don’t have to buy three different sized sofas, because you can make any size you want from a simple set of building blocks.
At a first blush, you might not think that a modern living room set is the most customizable type of furniture out there, or even that it’s particularly easy to work with. But with a simple range of materials (but a wide range of styles) it’s easy to find modern living room furniture that’s both easy to coordinate and utterly your own. What type of modern living room furniture are you looking for? Having trouble deciding the best layout? Let me know in the comments!
