Living Room
The room decorated for visitors, used almost entirely without them.
Sitting rooms get the budget because sitting rooms get seen, which produces a certain amount of decorating for an audience that turns up eleven times a year. The room you actually want is the one that works at nine on a Tuesday with the curtains shut. Fortunately those two are not in conflict. They are just arrived at in a different order. Browse new arrivals or the whole home and decor department.
Start with what you sit on.
Furniture first, since everything else arranges itself around it. Then lighting, which does more per pound than anything else in the room and is almost always what people skimp on: one overhead light is a waiting room, three lamps at different heights is a sitting room. After that cushions and blankets and throws, in weights that survive being sat against every evening rather than arranged once and photographed.
Then the walls, which most people leave until last.
Wall art, mirrors and clocks to move light around a room that probably has less of it than you would like, and wallpaper and murals if you are feeling brave about one wall. A rug goes down before any of that, and is the largest single thing you will buy for the room, which is why the size matters more than the pattern.
The last ten percent.
Which is where a room stops looking bought and starts looking lived in. Decorative accessories for the surfaces, pottery and glass artists for the objects worth picking up, and candles and home fragrance for the evenings. Allow yourself one thing that serves no purpose whatsoever.
Independently, room by room.
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