Carving out an entry in a tiny room

Recently, I was working on making a family room with a direct entry into the room from the front door.  My goal was to have a seperate entry and a cozy family room with plenty of seating for the large family of 5.  The rooms dimensions were 12×17 to start so there wasn’t much room to carve out an entry.

The floorplan below is the empy slate the room started as.  There is a large window but because of the single large opening across the room all traffic funneled through the center directly from the door.

 

I wanted to correct that by giving visitors a place to stop as they come in before they transition into the family room as well as add ample seating and entry into the kitchen.  The challenge was to avoid borrowing square footage from the adjoining kitchen as it was already small…so, the footprint remained the same.

I opened up a doorway that leads to the kitchen so the rooms could feel less seperated and help ease traffic flow.  I was able to carve out just enough space for an entry with room to hang a purse or coats and on the other side of that entry wall, there is a twin french mattress atop a built in platform and bookshelf which will add lots of lounging room and will give us a spot to mount the tv.  Two wall lamps are housed in the unit so that the homeowners children can lay down and look at books (or play on their ipods!) and it adds a warm, cozy feeling to that area.  Because space in that room is at such a premium and the family is large, the built in seating that serves two purposes works perfectly for the space.

Here are a few inspiration images that I used to illustrate just what I had in mind.  I used the two images below from one of my favorite designers, Lauren Liess to show how I wanted to nook to look in relation to the mattresses.

The finished product would be VERY similar to the image below except there will be a tv where the window is and additional shelving above.  The ceiling is taller in the house than this one but our built in will have drawers underneath, shelves on the side and lighting inside the shelves.