For most people the living room is very much the heart of the home. It is that warm and comfortable place where you can relax after a long day or where you might welcome your guests for an evening.

Given its prominent role in the home, one major priority for arranging a living room is to make it a comfortable and welcoming. A nice plush sofa that hugs you and invites you to put your feet up and relax is a good start. But the living room shouldn’t start and stop there. One highly underappreciated factor in living room design is light. In the long winter months it can feel appealing to shape your living room into a warm, dark isolated place for hibernation, but this is to ignore one important point. Your living room can be warm and dark at the same time. A bit of extra light in the room can lift the gloom outside. Add a large mirror to your room, to bounce the light around the space and create the illusion of extra depth.

The other way to bring some energy and colour into your lounge is to fill it with furniture that does this for you. A coffee table made from woven natural rattan fibres can have a brilliant effect on the room. The natural materials, sourced from far East Asia cast the mind off to a place of sea, sun and sand.

An alternative to the traditional sofa is a leather-covered teak double chair. With a body made from solid teak and an engineered seating position, a seat such as this will bring something interesting and a little bit different to the space, and support your back in a way that a sofa never could.