The Formal Sitting Room

Sounds terribly Upstairs, Downstairs, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not! It’s commonplace in Mexico to have both a formal sitting room (to entertain guests) and a relaxed, casual sitting room where the family watches tv and the children play (wreak havoc).  As my hubby was brought up in Mexico, this was the set-up in our last house and now this one too. An enormous bonus is that there’s no squirelling away toys and other crap when guests come over. 

The sitting room in this post is probably the one room we didn’t do much to in terms of renovation. When we bought the house, it was separated from the family room (now our dining room) by a pair of french doors. We took those and the dividing columns out, so now it’s a free flowing area between dining and sitting rooms.  After two years, we’re now wondering how to put a dividing “something” back in.  So typical. 

The room gets a lot of light, almost all day long, with the most beautiful light in the early evening. It streams in, and as the floors are quite dark, it looks lovely. It’s just gorgeous, even in winter time. 

It’s a regular shape and size, nothing particularly different about it – except the fireplace isn’t in the middle of the wall. This means that the coffee table is off-centre and this sends my OCD into all kinds of a frenzy. You’ll see from the photos that we don’t have a fireplace mantle. Or anything over it. It’s just the fireplace. Minimalism that even my husband cannot stand. The thing is, we’ve not found the right fireplace. Do we go all Versailles and sleek marble? Do we go modern and have a brass one? My only condition is that we don’t have anything that resembles the Coronation Street fireplaces. That faux stone cladding… One day, we will have a complete fireplace but nobody’s holding their breath.

Other than its ugliness, the fireplace is probably the best part of the room. It’s a bit of a ritual – lighting the first fire of the year – and then quite sad when we know it’s the last one. Last winter, Mateo got into it , watching and “helping” his father - and amazingly, after a few goes, he knew how to make a fire. I really hope it didn’t unleash an inner pyromaniac…

The first sofas we had with us from the old house were TINY. The last place was Victorian so the dimensions were totally different. The sofas looked ridiculous in this house. However, with so much else to do, they weren’t a priority. For some time, all we had were two undersized sofas, a coffee table and 2 school chairs. 

Both my husband and I are fans of the vignette. Another reason we married one another. However, no vignettes on our coffee table. Just books. Right. Lovely, well loved and cared for coffee table books. Gone within 60 seconds. Perfect height table (14 inches off the ground) for a small chubster to grab, flip and rip anything within reach. Quite often we’d find him on his belly, balancing on books in the centre of the table – flopping about like a beached whale. Literally having a whale of a time. Goodbye “nice” books. Adios also to other bits and bobs – in his mouth, up his nose, not to mention finding candlesticks in the downstairs loo on more than one occasion. We couldn’t have ANY other tables in that room. Unless something was the weight of an armchair with the same physics, the boy could knock or pull it over. 

It was pretty sad and empty. We’d spend the obligatory half hour in there every Sunday, forcing ourselves to read the paper and enjoy the fireplace. However, everyone was itching to go to the tv room, coming up with outlandish excuses to go upstairs, rather than say “I sodding HATE this room”. Okay, to be fair, everyone except me. I had no such shame in pronouncing my loathing for it. Quelle surprise. 

It turns out that the sofas were one of the big problems. We put the too-small sofas in the basement and got some extra long ones instead. They made a humungous difference, and although not a whole lot, we did start to use the room more. 

We put a beautiful Turkish rug under the coffee table to give more warmth, and 

as the baby got older, we could start to put things back on the coffee table. Mateo’s interest had moved on from things easily within reach, to other parts of the house that involved a chair or stool, sometimes even the dog. Anyhow, that’s an entirely different story for another day. 

The coffee table had been the hubby’s pride and joy. Hm. He had to get over that pretty damn fast. The scratches…*wince* , the deep indents from a certain short person banging his toys into the top…and also the chew marks. I’d like to blame the dog but no. It was our son. Moving on rapidly…

So, we had sofas, 2 Ecuadorian leather chairs (I’m sure they have a proper name but I don’t know it) from a great place in Middleburgh, Virginia called The Outpost, and 2 leather armchairs from Design Within Reach (which we both now loathe but hide them with sheepskin rugs that double as sofa throws. Sigh). However, the room didn’t feel right. Still. 

Six months ago, I found THE sofas of my dreams. A pair of them in fact. Velvet. Gold. Perfection. I’d been wasting time on 1stdibs.com and stumbled across them. We went up to Baltimore (Orion Antiques, ask for Eddie!) one weekend, saw them, fell in love and had them delivered the following week.  The second they were there, the room changed. It went from being meh to a room I enjoyed being in. We also got a “ridiculous looking” chair from the same place – it looked so fun and is unbelievably comfortable. I call it my large pasta roller chair. It’s off-white (nice and practical, not) and is covered in a fabric that feels like sheepskin but isn’t. 

There was a large space between the sitting and dining room which irked us. By chance, our new dining table arrived before we’d got rid of our current one…so it got pushed against the back of one of the sofas…Voila. Exactly what had been missing. The dining/sitting room table is too long, so we’re on the hunt for the right one, but for now, it’s great. It also sates my need to cover any and every surface with stuff.  I’ve changed the bits and bobs on the table a million times already. Bugger the minimalism. I am slowly but surely managing to usurp that nonsense. 

We also moved the overhead lighting fixture from our bedroom to the sitting room. It helped to bring the room together in terms of height. A lot of homes in the US don’t have ceiling lighting fixtures. That took a lot of getting used to. The fixture is a bit like a spider – 3 arms that can be moved about to one’s liking. The bulbs show though, so we found some nice looking, round orb jobs. Thank god for the internet. We put recessed lighting into the ceiling too, so we can play around with the “ambience”. Eurgh, that sounds like a Through The Keyhole line from Lloyd Grossman. 

The last thing to do, aside from the fireplace, is the walls….One wall is sorted with a large oil by a friend of ours from Oaxaca, Mexico. He’s a local artist, Guillermo Olguin, and we have several of his paintings. You either love or hate them. Some find them too dark or macabre but we love them. If you’re ever in Oaxaca, you must look him up. You won’t be disappointed. If nothing else, he will be able to introduce you to or expand your knowledge of mezcal ;-).

We had started off with a large triptych of a boy’s portrait on one wall but that’s been moved to the dining room, so now one large wall is bare. Looks terrible. We can’t put our finger on what we need to put there though. It’s a narrow space in terms of depth, so it would need to be a wall-hung piece. Thinking caps on.