Using the Right Hallway Furniture
There’s no room that makes a louder statement about your taste than the first room your visitors see when they enter your home. In many cases, it’s the entryway or entrance hallway. It’s important that the hallway furniture in your entryway is situated to impress and declare who you are as a person. It should create a welcoming environment. It should be warm and not startling. It should invite your guests into your home and help them feel relaxed as soon as they come through the front door.
Some Hallway Furniture Ideas
Hallway furniture should provide a last stop station for refreshing your appearance just before you leave the house, so a large mirror in an ornate frame is always a welcomed addition to a hallway. Mirrors can be one piece or multi-pieced, lined up or staggered in placement as long as they design is pleasing to the eye. A Baroque mirror with a gold leaf frame should be surrounded by antique French Provincial furniture. Two upholstered armchairs from the same period would look appropriate flanking a hand-painted yellow floral console table with a delicate scalloped edge tabletop. Line the dark wood floors with a French Aubusson runner in light tones.
Your home may have a hallway that needs furnishing on the ground floor in the part of your home that houses your bedrooms. This area can be decorated in a significantly less ornate manner, with more subtle hallway furniture used. A simple hall table or a bench for seating are all that’s needed in a hallway situated between bedrooms. The bench could be a storage bench and the hall table should be proportionate to the space available in the hallway. This area is essentially an area where the family would leave cell phones and other such items, so it would make an excellent charging station. They may also use it to remove outerwear or shoes. Having a shoe bin or coat tree available would keep this area neat and presentable at all times.
An entry hallway in the back of the house would normally house a coat tree, shoe bin and possibly an in-climate weather rug to prevent slips. You may call this area of your house, the mud room, where the whole family enters and leaves for the day. School age children could find cubby holes in built-ins quite useful if they held lunch boxes, backpacks, homework, keys, rainwear and boots. Each day could begin without a hitch if the children knew where to find these items before heading off to catch the school bus, so this type of hallway furniture can be very practical. The same is true for the adults in the house as well. When they leave the mud room, maybe instead of a cubby hole, they conveniently reach for their coat, sweater, rainwear or umbrella as they hang on the storage bench hall tree in a nice mission style with a top shelf for hats that’s cushioned for seating. You may want to include an umbrella stand in your hallway furniture too. Position it on one side of the hall tree and a shoe rack on the other side to keep perfect order in this very functional space.
Hallway furniture should first address the function of the room and then the design of the space. Using the right colored walls to set-up a warm feeling should only be followed by furniture and finished off with accessories like wall hangings, mirrors, paintings and plants. Always decorate with your own personality in mind and try to have fun sharing who you are with others.
