Living room with no features/focal point. What would you do?

[SadPander]

We currently have a lovely Victorian terrace, the living room has high ceilings, cornicing, chimney breast, cast iron fire and bay window. We are possibly moving to a 1960's/70's ugly boxy semi. Great family area, which is why we are making the move, but the living room in particular is uninspiring to say the least!

The room is squareish, around 14x13ft. A window to the front, electric fire on wall to the side (this will be going as I hate it), door to kitchen to the rear wall, door to lobby and stairs (hall has been opened into living room) on the other side wall. No focal point, the room looks and feels lost, boxy and boring!

So far my only ideas are to build a false chimney breast (probably wont have a fire in it the position would only be suitable for electric or flueless gas and I'm not keen on either) with an opening and either an interesting mirror/art above or TV recessed into wall. Or a wall of Ikea storrage filled with our books and TV.

Has anyone made a dull room look good or got any bright ideas or links to pictures?

I love that Alfiecat! can I be cheeky and ask roughly how much it cost? Has anyone seen anything similar not online?

I spent £500 on an original piece of art that is about 90cm by 60cm.

We've lived in Singapore and Australia for 16 years, so haven't had a fire. We have a red Chinese wedding cabinet (which contains/hides the TV) as the focal point - looks really good (I think!)

No problem you can be cheeky, though we actually bought it in Germany and moved it with us when we moved over here. It was 899 Euros, so about £600-700 for it all.

We bought it from www.ostermann.de/wohnzimmer/ceac8/wohnwaende/08ba2.shtml where you can see there is lots of choice, ours is quite far down the oage and is now 1099 Euro.

I saw something similar here in a furniture shop near us www.arthurllewellynjenkins.co.uk/collections/matrix this is the only one on their site I can find online but they had others on display.

Thanks!

I have done this (work) and I used an optimyst fire with an arrangement of low and high shelves looked really nice, it was a modern type stove just plug in and go. It had a nifty little water tank that produced mist with the coals and really looked like a smoking fire! I would stick with teh era of the house

We had this in our last house & simply put in an electric fire from B&Q, one with stones in the bottom. This, with the fire surround, made a lovely feature which everybody commented on. Those who hadn't seen the house before we had it didn't know it was not an original feature, iyswim. BTW, we did this fairly inexpensively as we bought our fire at the end of the winter season (March/April) when the store were selling fires off & then installed it in time for autumn/winter.

I have a new build. The focal point in our living room is our large flat screen TV set into IKEA glass fronted units. We have an eclectic collection of stuff on display on the shelves and I think it looks pretty cool.. To be honest we only use the room to watch the TV anyway (tend to sit in our big kitchen if chatting) so it makes more sense than having some fake fireplace and the TV stuffed in the corner.