Do you feel like your furniture just isn’t working for your mid-century home?
Your living room feels cramped. Your bedroom layout is awkward. You just don’t love the flow of your home.
As much as we love mid-century homes, they were built in a different time and for people with a different lifestyle than we live today.
Mid-century furniture was of a different scale (and quality!) than most modern furniture. Good furniture placement can help to maximize space, function, and mid-century charm in your home.
Whether you’re working with vintage finds, modern reproductions, or a mix of both, the right layout can make your home feel more spacious, inviting, and uniquely yours. Furniture placement isn’t just about making things fit—it’s about making your home feel right.
First, you’re not crazy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
YES, your house is too small for modern furniture
Reality check. The living room in your mid-century ranch is actually small by today’s standards.
Home sizes grew every decade since the mcm years. And furniture grew in scale at the same time. So planning layouts for modern pieces in mid-century homes will be a challenge.
Here’s what not to do:
Many people with too small mid-century homes try pushing all the furniture against the walls to “make more space.”
Ironically, this often makes a room feel smaller!
And it means you have to cut through the middle of a grouping to get from point A to point B. That always feels awkward.
Here’s a recent project that needed some help with living room furniture layout.
They have a tricky space – a great view on one wall, a fireplace on the opposite side. It’s narrow but needs to allow for walking through. AND it’s both their social hosting area but also their daily use hang out space. Tricky … but pretty classic for a mid-century living room. They’re just lucky it isn’t ALSO the front door entry.
Of course I gave them a couple of options. Here are my notes on the space and three options to consider!
Each option has it’s pros and cons. Which one is right for the homeowners depends on their priorities and preferences. But in this case:
Option A has a high drama corner reading chair in the corner and a casual grouping of loungy couch and a smaller two seater couch. This means you can sit on these to face either to the window or the hearth and keep up a conversation with the dining area.
Option B gives the end wall a “job” to anchor it with a wall mounted desk and shelving unit. A more two-couple guests pair of facing two seater sofas and a pair of swivel (this is a GREAT feature) chairs that can turn to face out the window or into the room.
Option C leans comfy casual with a truly big loungy couch that I’d choose if this were a reading afternoon napping kind of space. Flexible seating with swivel arm chairs toward the dining room and a mid size mid-drama chair at the entry end wall that is half in, half out of the overall grouping. Plus, a taller piece of furniture to go into that back corner gives you a “walk toward this” cue from the front door.
Tips to arrange furniture in a mid-century living room
To help your living space feel right-sized, try:
- Floating your sofa slightly away from the wall to create breathing room.
- Arranging seating in conversation-friendly groupings (rather than all facing the TV).
- Using rugs to define spaces and make each area feel more intentional.
Furniture should work with your home’s natural pathways, not against them. Before settling on a layout, walk through your home and note:
- Where do you naturally move? Avoid blocking these paths with bulky furniture.
- Where do you pause? Create inviting nooks in these spots with seating or décor.
- What’s your sightline? The first thing you see when entering a room should be intentional—ideally, a great piece of art, a beautiful light fixture, or a well-styled space.
Tips to arrange furniture in a mid-century bedroom
Bedrooms are an even bigger challenge. Mid-century bedrooms tend to be cozy (a polite way of saying small). And they have so many doors, windows and closets! Where do you put your stuff!?!
Does it help to know that I struggle with this question for my clients even tho it’s part of my day job!? Still there are some things you can try.
To make the most of your sleeping space:
- Opt for low-profile furniture that doesn’t visually overwhelm the room.
- Place the bed so it’s not directly in front of a doorway, creating a more restful feel.
- Consider built-in storage or wall-mounted nightstands to free up space.
In Today’s Episode You’ll Learn:
- Where furniture might solve your layout challenges.
- How to use furniture to create inviting spaces.
- Why (furniture) size matters in your mid-century home.
Listen Now On
Apple | Spotify | iHeartRadio | YouTube
Quick design tip for…pulling any room together
If you’re feeling stuck on how to pull a room together, try my Room Recipe approach. Pick three elements to build a cohesive space:
- A Mid-Century Furniture Piece – Like a streamlined sofa, a tapered-leg coffee table, or a lounge chair.
- A Bold Color Accent – This could be a throw pillow, a piece of wall art, or even an accent wall.
- An Authentic Mid-Century Detail – Think an atomic starburst clock, a sculptural lamp, or a vintage vase.
This simple formula instantly adds personality and balance to any space!
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
Curtis Jeré(and Similar) Decor
No mid-century home is complete without a statement piece of wall art and some of my favorites are the brass wall art pieces that were wildly popular in the 60s and 70s.
These sculptural pieces—the best known are by the design duo Curtis Jeré—create movement and mid-century drama on your walls. Whether you find an original or a vintage reproduction, these are an amazing way to bring dimension to your space.
Learn more about Curtis Jeré and HomeCo:
Resources
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass, “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)” available on demand!
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
One of the easiest and most accessible ways to transform a room in your home is by making some changes to the furniture in the space and how it’s laid out. Shifting your existing objects around can make a small room feel bigger, a closed off space feel more inviting, or encourage you to spend more time on your favorite hobbies or with your favorite people.
Della Hansmann
This is a two part special on how to arrange and add to the furniture in your home. Today we’re talking about where to move things, how to think about passages and conversation, groupings and proportions. And in two weeks, I’ll be back with a second episode on what items of mid-century furniture to be on the look for, to add to your collection, to switch in and substitute as you get a chance, or just to knowledgeably recognize when you see them in media. Hey there.
Della Hansmann
Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2010.
Della Hansmann
One of the reasons this is on my mind right now is that I spent, for me, a really fun time helping a friend of mine pick out a new sofa for her living room after her roommate moved out and left her sofa less for a period of weeks, I think she found the process quite stressful, because it was about making a big choice. It had color, shape, size, budget all tied up together, but we I had made a pretty good experience out of discussing what might work for her, looking at pictures, thinking about textures, price points.
Della Hansmann
We went down to the joy bird store in Seattle, in cap Hill, and I had so much fun checking out all of their options and getting to sit on them instead of just seeing them in catalog and internet pictures. Joy bird, I’ll talk about this more in two weeks. Is a fun option for if you’re looking for a modern piece of furniture that can they make a variety of styles. Can reproduce some mid-century style.
Della Hansmann
In the end, she got the best of all possible worlds by finding a used sofa on consignment that met all of her requirements. So that’s even better than a new purchase. She kept something out of the wait stream. She didn’t have to wait for specific requirements to be put together and for manufacturing delivery, and she didn’t have to pay as much. So she’s back in the sofa business again, baby.
Della Hansmann
It’s great, but it made me think about how furniture is such a fun and relatively light cost way to make your home more your own. Sure some of the Reach choices are spendy, and nothing feels particularly cheap these days, but there’s a lot of power in choosing and arranging the right pieces the right way in your home. This is also something that really applies to anyone who’s listening right now who doesn’t currently live in their mid-century dream home.
Della Hansmann
If you’re still an apartment dweller or you’re living in housing that you don’t feel as permanent about, you might want to choose smaller or more flexible pieces, but you can still make choices for furnishings that will travel with you into your future life of living in a mid-century home.
Della Hansmann
And even better, while you’re hunting on the perfect piece that might take you a little more time and money, you can rearrange what you have any time this weekend, maybe or even in the extra hours of daylight that we have stolen from our formerly sunny mornings the in this week after daylight savings time, enlist a friend to help you scoot things around or just get shoving.
Della Hansmann
Don’t forget to live with your legs, though, see if you can’t change up the way that some room in your house feels by creating a focal point, shifting your favorite love seat toward the sun, or just improving the way you can move through your most used rooms. Now, ultimately, there are some problems that need a little more solving than moving the furniture around. Hi, I’m an architect. Of course I think you can’t solve all your problems by moving the furniture.
Della Hansmann
If you know that you’ve got bigger changes in your mind of your house, then I would love to help you start planning for them. And if me saying the phrase bigger changes makes you think, I don’t know if my changes are bigger changes. What even are bigger changes? Well, I’ve actually got two master plan clients wrapping up right now that are taking absolutely opposite approaches to big change.
Della Hansmann
The first is jumping right in on a full household update. The contractor was actually starting on demolition while we were finalizing the design options for the homeowner. This remodel will be completed ASAP, and because it was a bad 90s Renault in the first place, it will touch nearly every part of the house. On the other end of the spectrum, though, I just delivered a master plan to a client who will probably do one bathroom and maybe some exterior work in the next year.
Della Hansmann
But they have now a vision for what they’re going to be doing, how they’re going to knock off a project at a time as they have energy, as they have leisure in their busy lives, as parents of young kids, and they also have their 10 year goal, what they want to do, how they want to add up projects that accumulate to a gorgeous, finished result.
Della Hansmann
So either way, there’s so much joy in having your plan in hand, and it can really help motivate you to move forward, to save harder, to move faster. To visualize the future you will live in when you get through your master plan process. Right now, we’ve got an opening in our spring design schedule thanks to a pushed project, which means the next project we signed will probably be wrapping up as soon as May. That is that is really soon from a design perspective and then be ready to hand off to a contractor to kick off entirely, or just do the first small project this summer.
Della Hansmann
The next few will probably not be wrapping up until June, which feels so far away right now. So now’s not the time to hesitate. Reach out today to start our conversation. I promise there’s no pressure. I will never expect you to agree to anything. But if you’re wondering how a master plan could benefit your home, your family, your plans, let’s schedule an appointment to chat about it.
Della Hansmann
Walk your fingers over to mid mod midwest.com/services and tap on the orange apply to work with us button that’ll take you to an easy form that just has a few questions about when your house was built, what conditions in, and what you hope to do to it. Then we can take a look at your house and your life together.
Della Hansmann
Maybe you’re dreaming of an addition to take the pressure off, to snug space. Maybe you want to set up an owner suite so you can start every day with a little private luxury. Maybe you want to reconfigure the footprint you have so that it’s perfect for having your friends and neighbors drop by and stay awhile.
Della Hansmann
Let’s put our heads together and see how we can solve that problem with architecture. For right at this moment, though, let’s think smaller. Here is a design tip that ties right in with today’s episode, because look, when you need to make a change fast, you don’t necessarily want to think about remodeling.
Della Hansmann
We’re talking today about furniture and furnishings and how to move the stuff in your house around. It can be so empowering to add a few correct mid-century elements to a space you already have and then look at that you’ve just made it better. But it helps to do more than just one new thing.
Della Hansmann
This isn’t buy a thing and stick it in the house. Although the perfect thing can certainly light up your day, it can feel much more tied together if you get a few things coordinating. So if that feels hard, check out the room. Recipe that I like to use, pick one piece of mid mod furniture, one colorful thing and one authentic mid-century style object to draw your eye and serve as a conversation piece.
Della Hansmann
This might be a coffee table, a rug and an atomic Starburst clock, or a bedside table, a throw and a vintage alarm, an entry bench, an accent wall paint color and a fun shaped mirror. The list goes on and on and on and on, you can just recycle this recipe into every room.
Della Hansmann
So today I’m focusing on something to pull a whole room together, which is a rug. Now, rugs are many and varied, but I’m a big believer in area rugs for every room and space in your house. You can have area rugs in your kitchen. They should be very cleanable, but it’s nice to have a little padding under the spots where you stand most regularly, so a small rug in front of the sink, in front of your chopping spot, in front of the stove, this sort of thing that you can pick up and throw in the washing machine on a weekly or a couple of daily cycle, perfect.
Della Hansmann
But also rugs in your living area as a rug to create a conversational grouping of furniture in the living space under a dining table to define that as a separate room, even though it’s connected to the main one. Rugs to separate two conversational looks from each other. Rugs in the bedroom, so you can put your feet down onto something soft. I love a hard service floor. For certain people, the concept of wall to wall carpet is so comfy and cozy and luxurious you just can’t live about it.
Della Hansmann
But for everybody else in a mid-century house, we do not need wall to wall carpet. What we’re looking for is hardwood floor, tile, cork, something easy to clean, universal run through most of the rooms in the house, and then you can define all of your interstitial spaces, all of your micro zones with rugs.
Della Hansmann
So remember, remodeling can be so slow, but changing your house doesn’t have to be if you add just three new or new to you pieces to any room, you can shift its entire vibe. And the best part is that those furnishing and decorative choices can inspire you to go further later or can be rolled into your future remodel. You aren’t doing anything now you can’t carry forward with you in the bigger project.
Della Hansmann
So if you want a handy guide to my quick start, room recipe, grab it at midmod-midwest.com/room, recipe. Now I’m going to go on and talk about the theory of how to place some of those pieces in with your existing furniture, and how furniture moves together can enhance a room. A lot of this is going to spring off of this, but if you’re just looking for if you’re just looking for snappy, fast, get things done quickly, get moving. Recipe start with three objects, one conversation piece, one piece of furniture, one colorful thing, and go. That’s your jumping off point.
Della Hansmann
A couple of weeks ago, we did a double feature on mid-century lighting, both how to think about lighting in a mid-century home and how to choose mid-century light fixtures for your home. You told me you really found that helpful, so I thought we would do it again with furniture.
Della Hansmann
Let’s talk about using furniture to make the most of your mid-century home. Now, heads up, I already know I’m going to split this into two parts. It won’t be an accident like last time. So today, we will talk about how to make the most of placement of furniture in your life. And next time, we’ll talk about the furniture, the specific pieces, the knockoffs if you’re looking for a budget, or the vintage finds you want to hunt down right away or over time in order to make the most of your space, the right furniture in the right places makes a huge difference to a mid-century home. And there’s a couple of reasons for this.
Della Hansmann
The first one is, you know, and I know that mid-century homes are not the most spacious, so getting enough furniture to live your life tucked into a small space can be a real challenge. And the second reason is that the simplicity of a lot of early mid-century homes intentionally leaned into people making personal furnishing and finishing choices to add detail and color and personality to the house.
Della Hansmann
If you think about a Zillow listing of a cleaned out, empty Time Capsule mid-century house, almost all of the personality of the details of the of the style will be concentrated around the front door, in the kitchen and in the bath or bathrooms. Those are the spaces where there’ll be the most wood built ins, the most colorful choices in tile and appliances.
Della Hansmann
Now, a well-crafted mid-century house will also have subtle, beautiful, unpainted wood trim and built ins, maybe throughout the house, in a dining area, a phone nook passing through from the kitchen, a set of wooden slider doors and drawers in each bedroom. But other than that, those other rooms might be pretty blank, as we talked about a couple weeks ago.
Della Hansmann
They won’t have a lot of wired and light fixtures. They won’t have a lot of built in details. But this is practicality the mid-century houses, particularly the early ones from the 19 late 40s and 50s, were built in a hurry, and they were built to be the house people could afford right then and improve on over time.
Della Hansmann
One of the ways they would improve on their homes was with furnishing. Like a lot of young people today, I suspect that most mid-century homeowners probably started out with a lot of hand me downs and cheap options. They might have been getting sort of the most store, department store furniture that was available.
Della Hansmann
Or they might have been furnishing their modern mid-century houses with antique pieces from the past. And in fact, when you look at magazine spreads and ads from that era, depending on what’s being advertised, if it’s not furniture, you might see some sort of rolled, turned armchairs and more 20s and 30s and even 80s and 90s of the previous century pieces in a mid-century house.
Della Hansmann
Because, you know, people have always furnished their homes out of their grandparents’ attics and yard sales. But the dream was to eventually level up, and in that era, leveling up meant getting a fully coordinated set of furniture and decor items that were probably advertised in well, you’ll see them in every home goods magazine ad from the 1950s and 60s.
Della Hansmann
They were in department stores and they were furniture, sofa set, matching chairs, coffee table, end tables, a rug, lamps, the works were all put together. You could pick and choose among them, or you could get a set that matched, and those sets that matched, those were the sign that you’d purchased it all at once, or maybe on layaway, but you had gotten it all so just like we talked a couple of weeks ago, that included the light fixtures, which is part of the reason that builders could get away with wiring and relatively few permanent choices.
Della Hansmann
So let’s talk about first, how to make the most of the furniture you already have, or with a few little tweaks to the setup you have. And then in a couple of weeks, I’ll be back to talk to you about some of my favorite signature pieces for mid-century homes, from high drama, the Eames bentwood lounge chair to this sort of vintage knockoff, non-name brand. It looks like an Adrienne Pearce Hall sofa, but it isn’t.
Della Hansmann
We’ll throw out a couple of names that you want to look for, both for sort of Google searches and to do a little bit of visual studying, so that when you see something in the wild, when you spot something at a rummage sale or an estate sale, or in an antique mall, particularly in an antique mall that does not specialize in mid-century stuff, you’ll know it and you’ll grab it. Of course, at the end of the day, the best piece of furniture to find used is one that you like, but we’ll go on from there.
Della Hansmann
So as we talk about working with the pieces that you have, we may start right off the bat with a scale issue. If you moved into your mid-century house from another larger house, something built in the 80s or the 90s, you might have purchased furniture for larger living spaces than you have right now, and you’re feeling that squeeze. If you’ve come from an apartment, you’re probably in better luck.
Della Hansmann
But the history of how you’ve chosen what you have, or how you’ve inherited it, or how you how it came into your life, makes a difference. The bottom line is that furnishing choices for mid-century homes, mid-century original furniture is a lot smaller than the stuff that’s on the market meant for houses built today, and that’s for obvious reasons, because house square footage has increased over the decades after the mid-century.
Della Hansmann
Actually, it started out a little bigger than the mid-century. In the 30s and 40s, there wasn’t as much new home construction, but the average floor area of a new home built in those two decades was about 1100 square feet. In 1950 it dropped on to 983 square feet. That was the medium home square footage. They were building them small and fast.
Della Hansmann
By the 60s, it had bounced back up to 1200 by the 70s, it was 1500 and you can see this in mid-century homes in Madison in particular, the watershed year where home square footage really started to grow was 1955 and a lot of places, I think this is true because of the 1954 introduction of the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Before that, it had been a 15 year fixed rate mortgage, so shorter timeline, bigger payments.
Della Hansmann
Once we spread out the timeline, people were willing to pay on their houses, they were able to pay for bigger houses over time, and from there, it just kept growing. It’s kind of an arms race of square footage. In 1980 the average square foot for a new home built was 1740 in 1990 it was over 2000 square feet. In the 2000s it was already 2200 and it’s just kept on growing. Now new homes today are not my primary interest, but I’ve heard rumblings that actually new home sizes are going down a little bit, but still nothing like a 1950s home.
Della Hansmann
Now today, homes built in the 50s and 60s aren’t all necessarily under 1200 square feet anymore, because they’ve been added on to and expanded over the years. But the point I’m making is about furniture. Even if those homes have been added on to and have more square feet, perhaps the rooms in them are not that much bigger.
Della Hansmann
The living room might not have grown. It might simply they might have added on a den out the back. So as our houses grew, furniture grew along with it. Visualize your classic 1980s coordinating set of lazy boy two seater and three seater sofas, the pride of the 80s. If your taste runs to oversized and over soft, you are going to be setting yourself up for a bit of a challenge.
Della Hansmann
I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but you may need to work on balancing scale. I happen to have just default into the other direction on the other side of the oversized over scale slider. I know I’ve made a compromise to make that happen, but the pride of my living room is a hand me down two seater sofa that my mom purchased at cost plus 10 when she worked at a Danish import store in the 1970s it’s a simple pine frame.
Della Hansmann
Probably I’m not going to get a tape measure right now, but it’s pretty deep, so you can really cozy back into it. It’s well over two feet deep, but it’s probably not five feet long. Two people can easily sit on it. Three people can actually jam and taunt it when I’ve got a whole bunch of people over. But it’s not a lounging sofa for two people alone. I can slouch across it, sit cross legged, lay sideways to read comfortably for hours. But this sofa was both designed to mid-century specifications and always meant to be an apartment scale sofa.
Della Hansmann
This is going to be the keyword if you’re looking for new constructed furniture in a mid-century style, you’re going to be hunting for the apartment sofa. Fortunately for us, there’s a whole population of other stylish people with disposable incomes who want to buy good furniture that fits in a small space. They are city apartment dwellers. So even if every other mid-century homeowner has decided to jam their house full of two big pieces, you don’t have to, you can look for the comfortable apartment scale sofas, but the other dimensional thing to note about mid-century sofas is not just that they are shorter and perhaps less deep, although, again, not necessarily.
Della Hansmann
My mind is plenty deep. It’s just narrow, but they are low backed, typically, you’ll typically see, you know, if you walk up to the back of a lazy boy sofa, I’m picturing my friend’s parents’ house, you can kind of lean right over and rest your elbows on the back of it while you talk to someone sitting on the other side of the arrangement.
Della Hansmann
My sofa probably it’s got a low seat. It’s not 18 inches off the ground. It’s more like 14, and I think the back of it entirely is less than 30 inches off the ground. That, again, is a design decision made by the original designer, the lower the backs of all of the chairs in the room, the higher the eight foot standard ceiling feels.
Della Hansmann
So the key point here isn’t that you have to have low backed furniture, it is that you want to think about the scale of the pieces that you have, and if you’re struggling to fit the furniture that you have into your space. It might be a question of whether the next incarnation of that sofa, if you’re ever going to replace it, is actually going to be a little bit smaller than the one you have.
Della Hansmann
All right, let’s get into the philosophy of arranging furniture in your life. Now, before I give you tips and tricks and talk about spacing and symmetry and how big a coffee table you should have. I want to talk about your priorities, what matters to you.
Della Hansmann
Remember to furnish your house for your actual life, and if that doesn’t immediately mean anything to you, let’s talk about what you do in your house and what you would like to do if you have the right setup. Perhaps the most obvious example for this is the dining table. People now. Some people, some families, based on how they were raised, how they’ve gotten together, how they live their lives.
Della Hansmann
Like to eat every meal at a table outside the kitchen, and that’s how they feel that they are enjoying their food, having a shared community experience, just being dignified adults. Other people are spider monkeys who eat every meal standing in the kitchen at their desk or curled up on their sofa. That’s me. By the way, I’m a spider monkey. People like me may or may not need a dining table. I actually do have one for a couple of reasons.
Della Hansmann
One, because it’s a pretty vintage piece that I got at a furniture store on my birthday that made me so happy. Also, because I do occasionally have family and friends over, but I eat at that table so rarely that my dog, who doesn’t really beg for me when I eat at the sofa, is a huge monster at the table, because she just I’ve not practiced making her have good table manners. But the third reason is that I often have 1000 piece puzzle out.
Della Hansmann
So really, what I have is a puzzle table that looks like a dining table and can pitch hit for me on special occasions. Now you probably know right off the bat whether you prefer to eat in the kitchen, on the sofa or at a dining table in a dining type space. And if you’re the latter, you need to make space in your house for a dining space. If not, don’t bother. Mid-century, houses are not big enough to have dining rooms you don’t use or even dining nooks of the living area that you don’t use. So that question, am I a dining table person or not? Is pretty binary.
Della Hansmann
You have experienced this. You’ve been weirded out by eating at your friends, places where they made you set a table to sit down, or where they asked you to sit on the sofa to eat a meal like spider monkeys. But you can take this approach to all the other rooms and uses in your house.
Della Hansmann
What’s more important to you? Space to spread out a hobby or space to comfortably host four couples? If you think about it like this, you can also look back at homes you’ve lived in well and poorly, places you want to recreate from your childhood, ways you saw adults entertain back when really good Airbnb experience, you had one time where everybody was just really thrown together in the living room and just had comfortable chats.
Della Hansmann
It might have been, oh, a, it may have been the architecture, but B, it might have been the furniture arrangement, the way it was set up, the type and style of spaces, the way the lighting was, how close or far away from each other, the furnishing was how close and open it was, or closed it was from other parts of the house. So a couple of practical examples, if the only comfortable chair in your house is the one that faces the TV, and also you find yourself kind of resenting how you mindlessly choose television watching every night, even though you wish you spent more time on your hobbies.
Della Hansmann
This could be related. This could be an issue you can solve by rearranging furniture. All right, so you knew I had to start with your priorities, with your why, with your dream step of the master plan method. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about some layout tips and tricks. I should caveat this by saying I am not an interior designer by profession, which is a profession of its own and has its own skill set and talents, but I’ve worked with the placement of objects and spaces that I’ve designed for the years.
Della Hansmann
And so here are a few things that I always bear in mind, particularly for a mid-century home. Let symmetry go. I have talked about asymmetry in the cornerstones of mid-century design, by the way, if you want that, it’s a free guide, and there’s also a podcast episode to go with it. Mid-century homes are not based on symmetry, and while your sort of classic colonial, formal living room might have two matching three seater sofas that face each other, a coffee table with an oval rug around them.
Della Hansmann
This is almost never going to work in a mid-century house, and you don’t even want it to. One of the reasons, though, that this is such a Get Out of Jail Free card is that symmetry requires more square footage than asymmetry. When you’re working with something that’s balanced but asymmetrical, you can tuck into a corner, you can leave one edge open so that it can become a through traffic lane.
Della Hansmann
You’re looking for something that’s going to balance but not match. So if you’ve got a hearth or a bookshelf or a TV, that’s your focal point, don’t feel like you have to have an even number of seating spaces on both sides of it. You want to be able to, frankly, un you want to balance the whole room or direct the eye by perhaps unbalancing certain areas.
Della Hansmann
So you might choose, for example, to have something higher or heavier or more dramatic on the opposite side of a furniture arrangement from the sort of walk through area, and then a lighter chair that sort of defines the edge of the rug and the edge of the pass through space. You can also play around. You don’t need to go with a full matching set, although I just said that the sort of ideal advertising home of a mid-century modern was matched set of sofa and chairs and coffee table and lamps and everything.
Della Hansmann
You can mix and match. And it’s really fun to create contrast. So this is another thing to bear in. Mind, if you’ve got a bunch of sort of blocky squarish low pile pieces, you could do a more playful shape. This is a place where, if you’ve got a sort of a squarish sofa, you could come in with an egg chair, or a womb chair, or something curvy and dramatic. We’ll talk about specific brands and designers in the next furniture episode.
Della Hansmann
But you can also vary the size and scale. Don’t be afraid to go too big or too small. With sofas and chairs or with art pieces or with light. You can always create a bigger seating area for more people to talk, and then a little corner nook was just a reading chair and a lamp off on one edge. You can also choose a bigger, blockier comfier sofa with a smaller, sort of anchoring color pop chair that maybe people only sit in when you’ve got the whole house occupied.
Della Hansmann
Or maybe you sit in it only if you want to have sort of a coordination conversation with your partner who’s sitting on the sofa. Or maybe you never sit in the opposite chair because it feels like you’re interrogating someone. You always sit curled up next to each other on to each other on this open I have a coordinating conversation. You do you, but thinking about it doesn’t all have to be balanced. It doesn’t all have to be equal. It doesn’t all have to be the same.
Della Hansmann
Material you can play with these variations. This is going to free you up to make the best use of your admittedly snug spaces. Now this brings us into mid-century house spaces, living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms are tied on square footage, and they’re also kind of awkwardly filled up with focal points, windows and doors. And what you want to think about is layout for flow.
Della Hansmann
Now, sometimes you’re trying to create a seating arrangement that makes you want to stay put. It is a place where you want to sit at rest and be in your reading chair, watch a show, have a long conversation with a family, have game night. But we also have to move around our houses, so you have to have room to walk around your seating areas, not just sit in them. I think, Hmm, at this point, I’m going to point you to one of my favorite books for reference on furniture, which is Frida Ramstedt, the interior design handbook. It is, by the way, on my resource list for mid-century homeowners. Get that by going to midmod-midwest.com/resources,
Della Hansmann
and I’ll put her name into the show notes for this episode as well. I should say she is speaking specifically about Swedish homes. She is a Swedish designer and will, for example, list measurements in metric. And she’s also not specifically focused on mid-century homes at all. But a lot of her advice is very useful for us, because the Swedish standard home is snugger, cozier, smaller than a mid-century than a typical American home.
Della Hansmann
So this is relatable to us Mid-century Modern Lovers. If you don’t know what I’m talking about that mid-century homes are snugger, cozier, more livable, go listen to more episodes of the podcast. Anyway, I’m citing Frida Ramstedt here because I want to specifically borrow from her approach to the design of houses around doorways. Houses are absolutely full of doorways, and mid-century, homes have a lot because there are a lot of rooms jammed into a small space.
Della Hansmann
So she talks about two specific types of space created by the existence of a door. The first one is as you walked right through a door opening, you step into a new space, and you are in a transition zone. It’s the little rectangle of space where you might pause and take stock of the room. You might look around to see if things are out of place and need cleaning up. You might check to see if the person you’re looking for is in there, or if your coffee cup is where you left it.
Della Hansmann
Now, if your room is a dead end, you might simply choose to walk into the room from that point or not. But if there are more than one doors, then the doors have also created a passage, or passages, connecting space between the doors. As you arrange the objects in the room, you can choose to lean into the direct connection between two doorways, or fight against it, creating logical or more created passages between the door is a big tool in your toolbox for how to move around your space.
Della Hansmann
Now, part of it is just where there are gaps in the furniture you’re going to walk where there isn’t stuff, but you may also be drawn forward into a room by visual reference. She uses a concept that she borrows from Greek mythology, specifically the myth of Theseus. He was given a red thread by Ariadne, which allowed him to find his way through the labyrinth and escape the Minotaur.
Della Hansmann
Now I love this concept of the red thread, and she uses it to give basically a design visual concept that ties together various rooms throughout your house, rather than thinking about the design of the living room is completely unique from the design of the kitchen is completely different than design of the entry or the dining area. It’s nice to have some thematic elements that come through. You might think of this as your style guide, just saying. But for her, it is the red thread which you use to lead yourself through the labyrinth of your house. It might be a color which could easily recur. Yeah. It might be a shape or a wooden grain pattern.
Della Hansmann
Now, Ramstedt recommends that you think of a few key transition zones in the house. Start with one, that space inside of the doorway where you stand or your guests might pause and take stock of the situation. Then make sure from that transition zone, that doorway, you can see your red thread item for me, that’s always gonna be the color yellow. For you, it’ll be a color you love, a shape you love, a wood grain you love you wanna see that show up in at least three places in sight from that transition zone, not just inside that room, but in any space you can see through a doorway from that room.
Della Hansmann
I love this as an easy concept to tie together spaces and also just the concept of the transition zone. This is really useful way to rather than looking at a floor plan of your house, or trying to sort of wander around and look at your whole space, stand in your doorways, and look out through the rooms and see what’s blocking your path, what’s inviting you in, what are your eyeline moments, what’s in daylight, what’s featured, what’s calling you to go hang out in that space. And if you have a few spaces in your house that you don’t make a lot of use of, think about if they have a failure at the transition zone that doesn’t invite you in.
Della Hansmann
One more tip I’m going to borrow from Ramstedt, which is something I’ve used myself in my own life, is that sometimes it’s actually easier to see what’s going on in a space in a photo than in reality. This sounds so crazy because you’re like, what could be better than actually looking at the space I’m in? But our eyes constantly edit, so when we’re looking at a space, taking it in in real time, we are looking for specific things.
Della Hansmann
We’ve got this sort of, oh, I’m going to really do a throwback here to the 80s, this sort of Terminator microprocessor, sort of searching for a specific thing and dismissing all the things that aren’t that thing. Whereas when you take a snap of a space, even if you take a picture with your phone and then just look on your phone at the flat image of the space you were standing in. You will see different proportions of height and scale, different lighting conditions.
Della Hansmann
You’ll see clutter if you’re ever trying to clean up your room or clean up a space for a photo shoot, the best way to check that it’s photo shoot ready is to take a snap with your camera, and then you’ll instantly see some object or clutter or cord or dust bunny that needs to be removed that you did not see by standing in space and staring at it for five minutes. It’s actually also a good play to clean up for company anyway. Total digression.
Della Hansmann
But I think if you carry on these concepts of thinking about transition sounds, thinking about where you want to flow and where you want to be at rest and thinking about your red thread design item that you can add. This absolutely comes back to the resource I was talking about at the top of the episode. If you want to use the room recipe to make spaces, go start with 123, your furniture piece, your color and your authentic vintage object, but then let that color be your guide as you go forward, make sure that color shows up in other places around the house that can become your red thread.
Della Hansmann
Color doesn’t have to be red. Let’s take the priorities you’ve thought about for your life and the design concepts, flow, balance, scale, contrast, and apply them to a couple of specific rooms that exist in every mid-century house. So in the living room, this is maybe the most complicated furniture arranging problem you will have in any house. Actually, maybe the most complicated is the bedroom. Whatever we’re starting with.
Della Hansmann
The living room, this is where people often make a key mistake, because the living room feels small and their furniture might be a little bit oversized and you want to feel like you’ve got lots of space. People will often shove all the furniture to the outer edges of the room, thinking more space in the middle is valuable. This is actually the opposite of what you want to do when all the furniture is shoved against the outside walls, Particularly when you’ve got like your big sofa is backed right up against the picture window and kind of blocking the lower trim of it, you instantly have a sense that the room is too small.
Della Hansmann
It also can actually, even in a small space, cause you to put seating units too far away. There’s a concept of the radius of conversation, which basically means the space across which you and someone else’s face might be separated. You don’t want them to be far enough away. You might have to raise your voice to speak to them. And this happens even if you’re sitting silently with people. We have a human sense of that’s that person is a little too far away.
Della Hansmann
This is generally considered to be about 10 feet. So if you measured from the back of one chair or sofa to the back of the opposite chair or sofa, it shouldn’t really be more than 10 feet. Now, again, if you, like me, live in a living room that’s only 13 feet wide, that’s three feet for a passage and less than 10 feet for furniture with its back, not against the wall, but you do want to draw things in, even if they’re just a few inches based off the wall.
Della Hansmann
That relief will take the pressure off the space feeling too snug and. Now you don’t actually want to plop your furniture centered in the middle of the room with space to walk all the way around it. A, they will feel oddly island like unless it’s a really big open plan space. And B, we don’t have room for that in most mid-century builder grade homes, but you do want to have it pulled a little bit away from the wall on one side and then have room to walk past it on two or one sides, the opposite side.
Della Hansmann
How do you make this feel anchored in the space? Hey, I said this at the top of the episode. In the resource, you put a rug under it. How big should that rug be? Well, I’m not going to give you specific dimensions, but I will say there’s kind of two theories for rug furniture placement. The first one is that you should have all of the furniture have all four feet on the rug. That’s great, but it’s probably not going to fly for a mid-century home.
Della Hansmann
And specifically, if you’re trying to create a furniture arrangement slid to one side of a living room with room to walk by sort of three feet, or maybe a 30 inch passage on the opposite side along a wall, you don’t want part of that passage to be taken up by rug. So instead, you’re going to do the other theory of successful rug placement, which is the front feet of all of the furniture are on the rug.
Della Hansmann
Do not give into that like tiny rug theory of none of the furniture’s feet are on the rug that that always looks chintzy and too small. But I also encourage you to think about kind of sliding.
Della Hansmann
Find the corner you can most specifically slide into, and particularly in mid-century living rooms, you’re going to take stock of where all your doors are and all of the passages that are created between one door and another, and try to get the furniture, the main furniture placement, out of all of those passage if you can’t do that, you’ll have to just say, Okay, this is a space where we walk around, what you absolutely do not want to do is that kind of college apartment setup where all the furniture is jammed against the wall, and you walk through the middle of a furniture arrangement, across a rug to get from one door to another.
Della Hansmann
That’s not a good place for your passages. For more on really successful solving of living room furniture challenges, I’m going to point you to Episode 1106 from February 2023 this is an entire episode dedicated to the question of, how do you arrange furniture when a TV and a fireplace both need to be accounted for, a classic mid-century living room problem.
Della Hansmann
And I don’t have time enough to get into it here, but I want you to go check that out if you’re curious again, I will link that episode in the show notes for this episode, as I started to talk about living rooms, I mentioned that bedrooms are probably the trickiest thing in a mid-century home, and they are because mid-century bedrooms are filled with doorways, closets and windows in awkward locations. In some mid-century bedrooms, they solved a little bit of the furniture problem by putting in higher, wide, but short windows, which a give you great privacy.
Della Hansmann
You know, if you’re if you’re not completely clothed underneath, you can look out, and if you happen to make eye contact with a neighbor, they would see only your upper torso and up. But even so, they can prove a little tricky to furnish around. In general, you’re gonna have to catch as catch can. Mid-century, bedrooms were also generally designed with a full size bed to be placed into them.
Della Hansmann
And these days, most people prefer a queen or a king or a California king. This is one of those places where you’re gonna have to either sacrifice circulation space or consider that this is part of your master plan process a bigger future project where we expand the square footage of your bedroom. But there are a couple of tips and tricks you can use.
Della Hansmann
This is where I absolutely love to see the creation of a feature wall with something that ties in the window placement that’s on that wall and wall mounted bedside tables and gives you at least 18 inches, ideally, two feet of circulation on both sides of the bed if two people are accessing the bed. This also gets into some rules of thumb, of ideally, it’s nice to when you enter the room, be sort of facing the bottom of the bed, so that you two people can either process around either side with relatively equal distances, but it may be that you’ve got to set up an arrangement where someone walks all the way around a bed to get to it in order to fit the headboard onto a wall that doesn’t have stuff on it.
Della Hansmann
I personally struggle with the layout of furniture in the designs for existing mid-century bedrooms for my clients. So this is not a beginner or an easy problem, but this is also a place where sometimes you just need to scoot things around and try you need to push the bed to one wall. Try it on another wall for two weeks. Live with it. See how the sun shines in your eye.
Della Hansmann
There are a whole bunch of considerations for mid-century bedrooms going beyond furniture. My master plan. Solution for a lot of mid-century bedrooms is to remove the necessity for furniture by doing more built in storage, which allows it to take up just a little bit more little less square footage in the room, to do double duty as seating or as a window unit or as privacy.
Della Hansmann
Create a design feature. But if you are lucky enough. To have a fun mid-century bedroom set, you’re just going to end up sort of squishing things around, and there will be some blockage of doorways or through lines in a mid-century bedroom. One more area I want to talk about furnishing in a mid-century house is your kitchen. Look. I know a kitchen comes with a lot of built in items, but if you have, right now a classic L or U shaped kitchen that only has work surfaces that face the wall.
Della Hansmann
You know, this is my pet peeve, so think about adding in a piece of butcher block furniture where you can have a tiny island look alike that gives you a little more circulation direction and a little bit more of a reason to face inwards and have a conversation with someone as you work on mixing or kneading or cutting.
Della Hansmann
Another tricky area to arrange the furniture in your house is in the basement. Basements of mid-century houses have a couple of snug scenarios going on. They often have a lower ceiling than the standard eight foot. So this is definitely a place to think about lower backed, lower seated furniture pieces, and if you don’t though, it’s also a place where maybe the esthetics matter less than comfort.
Della Hansmann
So if you want to have a cozy den for watching the game, playing video games, watching movies on Movie Night with your big Lazy Boy, lounger basement might be the place to do that. This is the sort of trade off you can make when you ask yourself about your own priorities. I do recommend, though, that if you are blessed with a bigger basement rec room space, one quality they often have is that they’re divided down the middle, either literally, with a wall or with a low soffit of some sort or an exposed beam.
Della Hansmann
The soffit would be concealing a beam. The wall would be concealing a beam that supports the center joists of all of the upstairs support. So when you have your whole basement divided in half, long ways like that, you get the ability to have some very tube like spaces. So this is where you can break that up a little bit with furniture. You can also break it up with walls.
Della Hansmann
But again, that’s getting into architecture if you make one or two seating arrangements, if you make a seating arrangement that’s maybe two thirds of a long, narrow room and then a separate seating arrangement or a table setup, a craft room, pool table. Pool tables take up more space than a third of a long narrow basement room. Anyway, if you break it up into two separate spaces defined with to wait for it, area rugs, two different light scenarios, two different sets of inward facing furniture, you will feel like the whole space is better proportioned than if you just connect it all in one long line.
Della Hansmann
For my last room that I want to talk about, it’s not a room at all. It’s outside your house. And you can actually do a lot with a few pieces of yard furniture outside your house, but they have to do a little bit more heavy lifting than furniture arrangements inside the house, because inside your house, you’re always playing up against existing walls. You have a backstop, both walls and a roof, a ceiling on what’s going on.
Della Hansmann
If you just arrange six Adirondack chairs all facing in a fire pit in the middle of an open space, it’s never going to be particularly inviting unless it’s dark out and the light of a fire is kind of defining an enclosed space, a hypothetically enclosed space around those chairs. Instead, if you can play with the combination of using furniture against the backstop of your exterior walls, if you’re lucky enough to have any sort of an L shape, perhaps an addition off the back that makes a den.
Della Hansmann
You can tuck furnishings into a corner and also help them divine the outer corner of a square or trapezoidal shape. If you don’t have that, if you’ve got a flat cliff wall back of your house, you can think about a piece of privacy furniture, the kind of fence you just jam into the ground. They can order in segments or build a fence to back furniture up against. You can string out a triangular shade sale between two points on a house and a tree, or the house and two trees, and that will give a little bit of a roof a definition.
Della Hansmann
If you can change the flooring material from grass to pavers or patio or concrete or deck, and then arrange some furniture, you start to create a livable space, and the same rules apply, even though you might not have a walled garden to deal with. There are still threshold moments where you walk out of a house and pause before you decide where into the yard to go, or maybe when you arrive from yard onto patio.
Della Hansmann
And if there’s just a blank edge of patio where it has no definition other than the edge of the patio stops and the yard begins. Maybe you want to put in some low plantings, or some built in bench, or something to define a spot that tells you to come in through here. Here is the entry spot the door, if you will. Here is your threshold moment. This is where you pause for your transition zone and take in the outdoor room.
Della Hansmann
So all of these topics kind of meld together. We can talk about outdoor spaces, we can talk about living rooms. We can talk about kitchens. The qualities that make a great space are that it feels good to be at rest in and that you can move through and around it. Well, I spend most of. My time helping my clients think about how they can change the walls, the structure, the windows, the openings, the physicality of their house to make those things happen.
Della Hansmann
But furniture plays a role, and you can actually make big improvements to the way your house feels livable to you by properly or I guess you could make a big change, a bad change, by improperly arranging the furniture in your mid-century house. So have you got good places to be at rest, good focal points you want to look at?
Della Hansmann
Are you drawn to spend your time doing the activities you most want to do by the comfort and light and accessibility and visibility of the various spaces in your house? And if not, start by fixing the furniture setup, and then maybe graduate to more dramatic plans, more master plan, opening up walls, creating sight lines, elevating a roof, adding windows, rearranging spaces, dramatic level interventions. So hopefully this has got you thinking a little bit about the furniture you already have.
Della Hansmann
Next week I’m going to give you a different topic. We’re going to talk about the mindset of making smart choices and how to keep yourself motivated as you go through a remodel. But the week after that, I will be back with a list of name brand furniture you might want to check out. Be on the look for used or to look for nice quality knockoffs of sometimes you can do all of those. I have a $50 womb chair knock off in my living room that I absolutely love that I got on Facebook marketplace on my birthday. I think I have a habit of buying, yeah, you know, I absolutely think about buying new furniture for myself on my birthday.
Della Hansmann
And this was a total find. And honestly, it’s a it’s an it’s the making of my living room. I love it. It’s comfortable, it’s dramatic, it’s good to look at. It blocks off the outer corners of the space and defines a passageway very nicely. It does all the things. And I was able to spot it and know what a deal it was, because I’m familiar with the saran and womb chair design, and the woman who sold it to me just thought it was a big, wide chair that didn’t fit nicely in her house.
Della Hansmann
And didn’t care. She wasn’t a mid-century furniture not fishing out it. So she got a good deal getting rid of it for some money. And I got a great deal, getting a big, comfy, wide chair for probably okay, just check the price for 1% of the cost of a brand new set in my upholstery color of choice sold to me by Noel. So that’s the kind of steel you can get for yourself when you know what you’re looking for.
Della Hansmann
And I’ll talk to you about some of the furniture names and brands you want to be on the lookout for the styles you might want to find. And also, it doesn’t have to be a name brand style. It just needs to be a mid-century style for you to love it. So vintage or modern, there’s a bunch of good options, and we’ll talk about them in two weeks. Meanwhile, if you’ve got questions about furniture for mid-century homes, let me know. I would love to hear them.
Della Hansmann
All right, for our mid mod house feature of the week, remember, I am asking for suggestions this week for new features to add to this year’s mid mod Madness bracket. But I’m still cycling through some of the ones from last year, and one of them that I listed last year as the C Jere, mid-century birds in flight. I actually completely mis categorized for everyone who saw it. You knew immediately what it was. I’m sure this is an oval shape. It’s a sort of a radial burst pattern of little wires that have an oval center that looks sort of welded in gold or brass, and on it are an array of a number of geese flying.
Della Hansmann
This is actually neither a Curti Jere product, nor is it called birds in flight. That’s a whole other art piece. So I need to recategorize this, but I still want to talk about this feature. I have it in my house. Many people have it in their houses. It was mass produced in the mid-century era. But that doesn’t make it any less fun, jaunty, joyful, delightful to have on your wall. I think that this type of mid-century brass, kitschy, fun, jaunty modernist art is so delightful.
Della Hansmann
You might feel differently, or your mileage may vary. Some types of this kind of art may really land for you, and other parts just feel like, Oh no, that’s, that’s weird, that’s, that’s kitschy in a bad way. Maybe you always think kitschy is a bad word. I think kitschy can really have its place in mid-century design. But the reason I thought of that piece as a Curtis Gerais piece was because it’s completely in line with the ethos of that line of mid-century art.
Della Hansmann
Now, if you’re not familiar, Curtis Gerais is the nom de plume of a pair of guys, actually brothers in law, Curtis frailer and Jerry Fels, who were New York based designers, and in the 1960s they come up with a concept that they wanted to have museum quality, gallery quality art available for the masses. So they started creating these jaunty, wild, wacky some of them are very odd looking.
Della Hansmann
Some of them are gorgeously minimalist brass and metal sculptures. This was either a side hustle of or it had a side hustle of costume jewelry, a side business. These were not side hustles. They were major manufacturing concerns, and in fact, actually, for whatever reason, Jerry and Curtis or fraler and fells, if you want to be formal about it, employed as many as 300 people per Wikipedia, many of whom were minorities or handicapped, who made these gorgeous, interesting eye catching features.
Della Hansmann
So if you’re looking for Curtis, Jere or C Jere, as it’s often abbreviated, online pieces, you’ll find them on first dibs on Facebook marketplace, in antique shops, there’s some really great pieces out there. And there is actually a piece that they named birds in flight that looks more like a bunch of bats flying across the sky.
Della Hansmann
To me, it’s more V shaped objects that are all connected up. I’m going to put some pictures of both of these, of a bunch of different things like this onto the show notes page, so be sure to go check that out. But I mislabeled this piece that is maybe the most common, the most signature wall piece, the big, wide oval with the geese on it. And there’s also, like a baby version of it.
Della Hansmann
There’s a tiny, round version with three geese on it. I own them both, and I adore them. Found them in different vintage shops over the years, but this was actually not manufactured by C Gere. It’s a nice knockoff, maybe more mass produced than some of the Jere pieces, and it was put out by home CO for their home interiors catalog in the 1970s.
Della Hansmann
not early, mid-century at all. That doesn’t make me love it any less. So this leads me to a side, side rabbit hole of what is homeco. And this was a production company that made a bunch of metal pieces, yes, but also kind of molded resin pieces, a lot, and a bunch of other slightly more repetitive, small, more decor, less art style, twining Ivy vines and little birds and butterflies and things. If you go into Facebook marketplace and type in mid-century, brash wall, brass wall art, you will come up with a host of these.
Della Hansmann
I have gone through phases of my life where when I’m feeling a low amount of dopamine, I just look for a reasonably priced one of those and order it. I also have a wide array of the same exact type of stamped out brass oak leaf that I probably have, like 50 of them, some of which are on the walls in my house, some of which are waiting to be created into a larger mural object. Doesn’t matter, these kind of things, again, your mileage may vary, particularly for some of the resin formed one.
Della Hansmann
There was a company based out of Syracuse, New York called Sirocco that made a lot of Hollywood Renaissance style mid-century things, a lot of gold, a lot of white paint on gold, fake gold, of course, metal, wood, resin combinations that a decorative version, a diamond shaped trellis with art on it for each of the four seasons, for example. And they’re kind of goofy, and they’re also kind of great.
Della Hansmann
So I think these are something fun to look out for if you want to go searching online. Homeco, H O, m, c o, Z, Sirocco, Sy, R, O, C, O, and Burwood are also great things to sort of start your random mid-century art search for you can also just go to any vintage shop or antique mall and poke around until you find something, probably in metal, maybe in faux wood, that looks interesting to you, strikes your fancy.
Della Hansmann
It does not have to have a fun provenance to be a fun object, but it is fun to look if you’re looking for Googling, you’ll want some of these keyword names to find these things. So forgive the ramble, but I’ve just been amusing myself by filling in some gaps in my own knowledge. Here the piece I’m talking about, the piece that was in the mid mod madness matchup last March, and probably will be again, because I adore it, but I’ll correctly label it this time. Should have been correctly labeled sunset flight by homeco.
Della Hansmann
So it’s also fairly easily searched for as Starburst with birds. But if you have this in your house already, send me an email, send me a DM on Instagram, let me know that you have it and you love it. My personal love for mine is in no way diminished by knowing that it’s not actually a seizure, a original, and maybe let me know. Do you even do you like this kind of metal fabricated wall art at all? Does it work for you? Does it appeal to you? Does it look like total junk affixed to somebody’s wall? Does it only work when it’s combined with a bunch of pieces into kind of a gallery wall style. Inquiring minds want to know.
Della Hansmann
And by that, I mean me, I want to know. I’m going to pull together a couple of images of these to add to the blog post for today’s podcast episode. Go on over and have a look at them and then let me know what you think you. So you can find all of this at our show notes page, which is midmod-midwest.com/ 2010, and remember, the most important thing about any change to your house is why you’re doing it. What’s important about it to you?
Della Hansmann
But once you know what your goal is for a given space, do think about giving yourself some leeway to play with balancing, rather than symmetry, with creating contrast between materials and scales, and also by absolutely arranging your house so that you are invited forward into every room from the door threshold, and you have room to move smoothly through it. One thing you never want to do is walk right through the center of a furniture arrangement to get from point A to point B.
Della Hansmann
If you’re looking for help to get going with your design this spring, this summer, this year, then there are three easy ways to work with mid mod Midwest. And as a reminder, you do not need to be in the Midwest to work with us. We’ve done projects from Washington, DC to Washington State. Oh, and yeah, a whole lot of them here in Madison and around the Midwest too. If you need some quick design advice. Sometimes you just need to reach out and ask a bunch of rapid fire questions.
Della Hansmann
Sometimes you and your partner both need to hear the same answer from a professional. Sometimes you want your hand held by someone who cares about mid-century before you pay a lot of money for new signing or new deck or replacement windows or a new front door.
Della Hansmann
The two questions answered on one of our easy 30 minute design consultation, Zoom calls. We’ll do a whole house audit or focus on one specific space. You choose the scale. If you need ongoing support and a little loving kick in the pants, some encouragement to get your plans rolling, you might be a perfect fit for our ready to remodel program, where I walk homeowners through the steps of the master plan process.
Della Hansmann
You can learn more about that, get in depth information on the master plan method, and check out my free master class all at mid mod midwest.com/ready, or just let mid mod Midwest do your design thinking for you. If you really want a big picture preview of everything you’re ever going to do on your remodel, then you want a master plan, apply to work with us for yours today.