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Great minds may think alike but few actually enjoy being the unwitting character in the trope of two party guests dressed the same. If you’ve ever experienced a disorientating wash of déjà vu when stepping into someone else’s living room, you may be interested in finding ways of differentiating your own space. In this guide, we take a look at the various avenues for creating uniqueness in your seating lounge.

Feature Walls

Unless every piece of furniture is individually manufactured to your specific tastes, there’s a chance that the arrangement of your living room is similarly, if not identically, represented in someone else’s home. To differentiate the pictured seating lounge, GDY Design & Construction apply their creative impulses to the surrounding walls by relying only on a monochromatic palette and a simplistic brick motif. With the walls rendered unique, their efforts encapsulate the furniture arrangement in an environment that could only be duplicated with access to the designer's schematics.

High Ceilings

Just as the oculus—the circular skylight at the apex of the Pantheon’s dome in Rome—has provided pilgrims and curious sightseers with spiritual experiences for over a millennium, an extra-height ceiling or an air-well appointed with generous windows and skylights will create entry points for sunlight. As the quality of sunlight varies over the course of the day, the tones of the pictured seating lounge are highlighted in various unique ways: the warm and ethereal light of sunrise and sunset accentuates the darker colours, while the brightness of midday emphasises the white background.

Aquascaping

Beyond being an element of favourable geomancy (feng shui), an aquarium in the seating lounge is another dimension of decoration that can be altered over time much like a garden on dry land. ID Industries, the designers of the pictured living room, tactfully include a lush planted aquarium into a space dominated by grains of wood. This unique decorative feature extends the organic theme of the space, while simultaneously acting as a physical barrier in the open layout and providing a source of soft lighting that ripples with movements in the water.

Customised Shelving

Slabs of marble are never identical, even when comparing two sequential cuts from the same rock face of the same quarry. Getting shelves made to specifications is perhaps one of the most common methods of differentiating a space, and opting for shelves made from marble adds a layer of uniqueness with the highly variable shades and veining patterns typical of most marbled stone. In the seating lounge pictured above, the customised marble display surfaces are combined with gilded accents, mirrored panels, and darkly stained wood to create a palatial space fit for royalty.

Floor Displays

Where most would opt for a uniform expanse of seamless stone on the floors, an artistic display deliberately laid beneath one’s feet provides a surprising point of intrigue in the seating lounge. In the pictured living room decorated by Mode Interior Style, a Zen-inspired display of white river pebbles is contained within a raised dais of wood to demarcate the space and provide the naïve eye with an additional decorative feature to linger upon.

Musical Instruments

Whether it is a museum piece or a more contemporary instrument made affordable by mass manufacturing, a musical instrument provides the potential for creative expression and draws attention in the same way that an unfinished painting in a gallery of finished works invites intrigue. The classically inspired décor of the pictured home is complemented by a ubiquitous grand piano of modern origin, but the auditory sensations that this instrument could produce render the space unique with the anticipation of a musical experience.

Dramatic Lighting

Just as sunlight affects a space in highly varied ways through the day, artificial sources of light can also serve to accentuate colours and paint a living room in unique tones. As demonstrated by Design Base in the living room pictured above, a refined and carefully curated blend of architectural finishes, decorative features, and lighting result in a space that will not easily duplicated elsewhere. In this seating lounge, sheer curtains filter the sunlight to complement the pale wood floor, the white walls, and the ultraviolet tone of light emitted from concealed sources in the ceiling tray and around the feature wall.