A family room can accumulate a lot of media, accessories, games, and electronics. Use these simple ideas to keep all those entertainment components in check.
In a den or media room that hosts family activities every night and all weekend long, the need for good looks and organization is important. Decorate with both busy gaming nights and quiet contemplation over a chessboard in mind. Here, soothing gray and vanilla hues mix with energetic corals and oranges. Furnish with leggy, lighter pieces that are easily moved around. Unless your room comes with a wealth of built-in storage, freestanding furnishings will have to take up the slack. Look for pieces that offer optimum storage capacity while still providing points for character and style.
A pair of small tables stand in for a larger coffee table, offering functional flexibility. Lined baskets, sized to slip easily out of sight into cabinet drawers, keep DVDs organized by genre. A tabletop box ensures that the remote is where you expect it to be rather than down the sofa cushions.
A freestanding media cabinet like this one from Whittier Wood Products (whittierwood.com) packs a lot of storage capacity in a relatively small footprint. Shelves inside the media cabinet house the DVD player and gaming console, as well as a basket playing tidy host to all the components of video gaming.
A series of small drawers in the media cabinet can hold a library’s worth of DVDs, CDs, and video games.
Comfy seating is essential in a family room, especially one used for gaming when people can sit without moving much more than their fingers for long periods of time. A cozy sofa and the classic shape of a cocooning midcentury-style womb chair fill the bill.
A stepladder fitted with 48-inch shelves holds a surprising number of board games and collectibles. If you need a lot of space to shelve books, photo albums, bins, boxes, and objects, consider a wall of matching bookcases that can be trimmed for a built-in look. Opt for a modular shelf arrangement or floating wall shelves if you have a variety of things in different sizes and need flexibility in your design.
Choose a sofa table (again, ours is from whittierwood.com) that includes drawers and a shelf to store gaming supplies, and other essentials. Use bins, baskets, trays, and covered boxes to keep things tidy. Periodicals can pile up quickly so provide a woven wicker tray atop the console or a magazine holder on a shelf to keep them all in check.
Stay warm and snuggly with throws and pillows. Use a large basket to store them under the console table when not in use.
Keep small gaming pieces, scoring pads, pencils, and playing cards tucked away in a drawer organized with inserts, trays, bowls, or drawer dividers.
We’ve probably only scratched the surface of the stuff you need to store in your family or media room. What other solutions have you created to keep your living space uncluttered and family-friendly?
Photography by Chris Hennessey
© Caruth Studio