Take a tour of Lexi’s ‘sexy’ snug to give you the small room design ideas you've been looking for. Once an unused playroom and a graveyard for the children’s long forgotten toys, it has since been transformed with glowing space-age lighting, a ‘get me off it if you can’ Hay leather sofa and tactile textured wallpaper. It's now a retreat for grown ups and a space for Lexi and her partner to enjoy a glass of wine after dinner, a movie night with the kids or a slightly tipsy board game or two with friends. It’s a lesson in how to maximise comfort in the smallest of rooms.
Designing a smaller space like a snug or a den is, for some, a greater challenge than any other room. These multi purpose rooms are of course a luxury, having an additional space beyond a living room or kitchen to design, but because they’re smaller and don’t have a clear function, it can often feel like there’s far less to play with.
Our snug is nicknamed the “sexy snug” because once the overhaul from a playroom for babies and toddlers it was able to take on a much more mature vibe and become a retreat space to flop before or after meals.
It’s right off our kitchen and so felt natural to continue on the active design of the marble floor and dramatic black cabinetry into the snug. The room is blessed with high ceilings, normal for the period of the house but exceptional in the fact the room itself isn’t that big so it left us with an unusual dilemma; how do we draw the eye up to take advantage of the height but also make it cosy? I chose a woven wallpaper by one of my favourite brands Pierre Frey to draw the eye up but because it’s textile based it gives the impression of being wrapped in your favourite jumper. It softens edges and somewhat sound proofing; ideal for Georgian homes that have a tendency to be quite echoey.
Since our kitchen cabinets were black I decided to continue this below the rail to interlink the rooms and along the frames of the black doors and windows, a reflection of the vertical print in the wallpaper. With all that monochrome, it felt appropriate to add in the earthy natural tones of the tobacco leather Hay sofa that I had spent many years lusting over before finally committing, and a faux marble sideboard that looks like a bar cabinet but is in fact the central station for everything our two furballs Vegas and Baby need.
As the room started to take on an almost fifties spaceship quality to it, I felt like it needed an ethereal light fixture like this one to counterbalance the intense midnight black that was emerging. This pendant light looks like a droplet of water with its mirrored shine that reflects light throughout the day but then gives off a soft glow in the evenings when the sun sets through the glass of the french doors.
With the addition of fine art from my favourite galleries like Among the Pines and the first of my collection of works by painter Henrietta Dubrey, the room becomes visually complex and multilayered. A room design should draw you in all year round, from the summer nights with the doors open and a glass of wine, to the winter days with the kids in front of the fire, buried under blankets and a pile of magazines. This little snug is just that for all of us.
