A home is more than just a place to eat and sleep. It’s also a place to entertain, work, exercise and play in as well. With the right multi-purpose room ideas, your home can provide a variety of functions, even without much space.
Transforming a home into one that is more functional is as easy as turning living areas like the dining room, living room and spare room into multipurpose spaces.
Creating a room that serves more than one purpose may sound challenging. However, with space-sensitive furniture and a few clever design strategies, you can have that dual-purpose guest room or multi-purpose living room while keeping it aesthetically pleasing and fully functional.
Below are a number of ideas to organize and design your multi-use areas.
USE SMALL SPACES TO MAKE A BIG IMPACT
Put those often overlooked corners and closets to good use. For instance, corner shelving units are a great way to organize your things and keep your small spaces tidy.
Create a “Cloffice”
If you have a closet in your room, you can turn it into a closet office. This room, equipped with this “cloffice”, can be both a workspace and a welcoming guest room. Maximize your storage by adding shelves, table hooks, a chair and a dresser. When you’re not using it, you can tuck it away. You can even consider adding a New Table Concept to fold away when not in use!
Now you have transformed this small room and closet into a home office/guest room combo! With roughly half of the US workforce holding a job where they can work from home at least half the time, having a “cloffice” makes a lot of sense.
Make Use of Your Corners
An often overlooked and under-utlized space in the home are corners. With a corner desk, you’ll have enough room to pay bills, check your email or write the next great American novel. Corner desks use your small spaces more efficiently than a regular rectangle tabletop, which is the key to success in a small space. Add a TV in another corner or a corner shelving unit, and you have just created an office/bedroom combo that still has a lot of space. By having your desk inside a corner cabinet, you can close it up in the evening when you’re not using it.
Corner shelving is a great addition to the space, creating a spot to put books, plants and decorative items for a stylish nook.
CREATE A UNIFYING STYLE
Add a little unifying theme to turn your multi-functional rooms from crowded to cohesive.
Play on Colors in Kids’ Bedrooms
If your children share a bedroom, you can still give them that sense of individualization by color coding their “sides” of the room. While each may have similar design items like beds and dressers, making the room feel cohesive but the color differentiated makes each child feel like they have their own space.
Play on Textures in a Dual Office/Bedroom Setup
If your bedroom also acts as your workspace, your bedroom/office doesn’t have to resemble a cubicle. Consider incorporating soft furniture that’s functional for work but feels like it belongs in a bedroom. The office furniture can also look and feel like bedroom furniture with appealing colors and soft lines. The bedroom office will still be your workspace, but this will keep its comfortable, homey look and feel.
You can incorporate your own unique style, too, such as an elegant lamp, decorative chair or stylish shelving like the X2 to add some pizzazz and take the “corporate cubicle” look out of it.
Blend In: Bringing Your Rooms Together
Transform your guest room into a laundry room, craft room or home gym by utilizing furniture that tucks against the walls, such as folding chairs, fold-away beds, hideaway tables and Murphy beds.
STORAGE IS KEY
The more storage you have, the tidier and more organized your rooms will be. Don’t forget to add some decor to your storage to give it a nice aesthetic. For instance, you can store away your kitchen tools in wooden canisters next to a couple of pretty floral arrangements or potted plants, or clear away your bathroom vanity by hanging up glass mason jars to store your cotton balls, makeup brushes or Q-tips.
OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND
Utilize Sleek Cabinetry and Panels in Your Laundry/Craft/Guest Room
Want some guest room/craft room combination ideas? How about adding some wall-to-wall cabinetry in your multipurpose laundry/crafts/home office room? The secret here is that your front-loading, stacked washer and dryer are tucked away inside the panels where they can’t be seen.
Use Foldaway Furniture in Your Combination Guest Room/Home Gym
Have you been looking for a way to work out but don’t have the space for a home gym? Considering only one in five homes have a fitness or recreation center or a park within a half of mile radius, having a guest room also function as a home gym is something many of us could benefit from.
Add a Murphy Bed to Your Library/Den/Guest Room
Looking for more multi-purpose guest room ideas? Try a private guest room that turns into a library. With a Murphy bed tucked away inside a custom cabinet, this can be done easily and look great. You can have bookcases during the day for your home library, and come nightfall, slide open the side panels of a Murphy bed to hide the bookcases and turn the room into a guest bedroom. There is no need to move things around to try making room for an extra cot or air mattress.
FIND PIECES THAT DO DOUBLE DUTY
Is it an office, bedroom, living room or multi-purpose dining room? You decide. For multi-use rooms, find furniture that can serve multiple purposes, such as:
A dining room table that can serve as a desk
A couch that doubles as a bed
A coffee table that transforms into a table
Design a Living Room That Doubles As a Home Office
If you work from your home, you can have both a home office and cozy living room all in one. Add a little personality to the room with an L-shaped sofa while controlling clutter with built-in storage. You can maintain balance and a sense of order in your multi-purpose living room/office with a white color scheme, which keeps it from feeling cramped.
Transform One Room Into Three
By adding a Murphy bed that comes right out of the wall, a dining table that can also be used as a desk and a kitchenette, you can give your room three-room functionality.
Plan a Dining Room That Doubles As an Office and Living Space
Now you can have a dining room, living room and office all in one. By including a dining table you can also use as an expansive workspace and double-duty furniture and modular glass-fronted cabinets where you can store your books, it’s easy to switch uses for this room. You could also find chairs that hang on the wall– when entertaining guests, you can easily add seating to accommodate them.
Still looking for multi-purpose dining room ideas? Think about turning a rarely-used, formal dining room into a hangout room for your children or an office space for you. By combining a daybed, an understated table and slim folding chairs, you can go from dining to working in no time flat. Add a couple of bookshelves and you can divide the space up so this one room has three different functions without disrupting its flow.
