Two living room styles highlighted with beautiful soft furnishings

Last year, Chanya, also an interior design consultant, took things up a notch with the launch of The Pure Concept Home, a lifestyle store that offers the gamut of home design and decor solutions, apart from fabrics for soft furnishings.
 

Using all her knowledge, experience and a well-honed sense of aesthetics, Chanya uses the new collections from Ador and Pure Royale—two of Asian Paints’ fabric brands—to explore two different looks for living rooms. “You can start conceptualising the room you’re working on by including the fabric right from the beginning.”
 

Chanya has created two completely different ‘looks’ with a combination of fabrics that she’s paired to balance one another. The mood boards illustrate the principle of this styling.
 

Mood Board 1: A Mix of Textures and Prints

This combination of fabrics works best in a space with a neutral wall colour—ivory, beige, the like. As for flooring, you can play with textures. In this setting, Chanya opts for darker-coloured fabrics with different-sized motifs and prints in a variety of textures.

For the Windows: When it comes to curtains, consider the scale and height of the windows before finalising a fabric. The alternatives here are playing it safe with a “simple, easy texture in a warm white, like this Ador fabric. Or you can try this linen fabric from Pure Royale with a medium-scale digital print layered with foil in a very uneven, soothing texture.” The gauze-like sheer from Pure Royale is perfect to filter in some natural light. If you’re in the mood to experiment, then start small and pick out striped sheers, like this fabric from Pure Royale.

As an Accent: Chanya’s final addition to complete the look is a small-scale, all-over-print fabric from Pure Royale that can be used however and wherever you choose to.
 

Mood Board 2: Keep it Neutral

For this look, the fabric choice stays within the spectrum of beiges, light greys and ivories. A failsafe colour palette for small spaces, the neutral-tone fabrics, Kaur advises, would be beautifully complemented by walls that are a darker shade of grey.

For the Windows: A two-tone embroidered fabric from Pure Royale with an abstract leaf motif works nicely as draperies—curtains or blinds. Again, if large-scale motifs don’t work for you, another option is the always-popular paisley print on this slate-grey polyester fabric from Ador.

To complement the curtains is a cotton-linen ash-grey sheer from Pure Royale with a diamond-patterned stitch detail in the centre.

A Must-have Solid: Given the surfeit of prints used, break the busy designs with a solid-coloured fabric. “This solid from Ador has a 3D texture which adds volume and depth. This too can be used as an upholstery fabric.”

If you are inspired enough, and armed with sufficient information with the different looks, here are some important tips to keep in mind when fabric-hunting:

• It’s always better to start with a mood board by laying out all the fabrics on a table and getting a visual sense of how they could complement each other.
  
  
• Choose fabrics based on the size and scale of the room, the size and type of furniture, and, for curtains, the height of the windows.
  
  
•  Be sure you choose a mix of patterns, not just in style but in size as well—opt for small-, medium- and large- scale prints if possible.
  
  
•   If you have a larger living room, you can use bold, larger-scale patterns for curtains. Light sheers work well in any space as they allow natural light to filter in. Wider-width sheers are great if you want more daylight in your space.
  
  
• Any room, whether it’s a bedroom design or living room, needs a mix of seven to eight kinds of fabrics and a good mixture of different kinds of prints and patterns to add some drama and give life to the space.