Upstairs Family Room

It is time to start thinking about what to do with the living space on the second floor of our house. Malaysian's call this room the "Family Room". The room gets really hot because of the many windows, especially the long windows in the front of the house. These windows slide open, but during the day that usually makes the room hotter because the sun shines right in. Keeping them closed is better because the windows have a light sunblocker material on them. So, even though we have put a York air conditioner and Panasonic ceiling fan in the room, we don't plan to sit in there much during the day.

The room and ceiling hasn't been painted yet and is currently a very pale green tint, we will most likely go with bright white by Nippon. Maybe an accent grey color on the large window wall (not too dark) only.

I have been looking for sofa sets for this room but really can't find anything. I am liking the ads that I am seeing in international magazines that are showing cushions or low-type couches with lots of pillows. Someplace to just lounge around. So I brought up one of the living room cushions and a couple pillows to see if a low cushion formation might work. It seems to work fine and looks good as this room leads to our Home Office. I have taken measurements and am going to go back to Ikea because I saw some long grey cushions that were about the size of twin beds (not that I want more grey, but will take it if it is all they have and then use some kind of bright big pillows to accentuate). I think we will need 4 of these big couch cushions (which are actually longer than the couch cushion I brought from the living room) placing two along the wall under the air conditioner and two under the long window.

I also brought out a large piece of brown laminate that I had to mark the floor path to see if a coffee table in the middle of the room would work or if it would block the traffic pattern into the home office. No, it doesn't but it should be bigger and still it wouldn't be useful really because it is too far from the cushions to set your glass on or use it. Often times in home magazines especially contemporary homes I see these big spaces with two sofas and a coffee table in between them and there is so much space, it seems useless to me. So maybe two very long 8 foot by 18 inch very low coffee tables running in front both sofa cushions might look nice, be something different and actually useable to set books on, your drink, laptop, etc. They could be made out of wood/laminate or maybe glass. From what I can tell, there would still be enough walking space in the center of the room to get to the office. OK it all depends on finding the cushions.

Below are some examples of Mah Jong Sofas by Roche-Bobois which are low cushion seating configurations. Although these have a nice back rest and mine will only have big pillows...