*Every room has four of them, and most of us waste all four. Here's how to decorate from the edges in — and why the corners are where a room is really made.*
Think about how most rooms are arranged. The sofa goes against the long wall, the television opposite, a coffee table marooned in the middle, and everything huddles toward the centre as though the edges were out of bounds. The result is a room that's busy in the middle and dead at the corners — four empty triangles where the walls meet, doing nothing, saying nothing, quietly draining the life out of the space.
It's the corners, though, that do the real work. A room decorated from the edges in feels grounded and complete; a room decorated only in the middle always feels a little as though it's floating, unfinished, waiting for something. Fill the corners well and everything between them settles. Here's how.
Why corners go dead
A corner goes dead for a simple reason: it's the hardest bit to light, and the easiest bit to ignore. It's out of the main traffic, out of the fall of the window light, tucked away where the eye slides straight past it. So it collects shadow, and shadow reads as emptiness. The whole art of a good corner is really the art of giving the eye a reason to travel out there — a glow, a shape, a bit of life — so that the room feels used all the way to its edges.
Almost everything that follows is a version of that one idea.
Put light in it — the fastest fix of all
If you do one thing to a dead corner, put light into it. A floor lamp angled into the angle of the walls, or a table lamp on a small table tucked into the corner, and the whole thing comes alive instantly. The corner stops being a pool of shadow and becomes a warm point the eye is drawn toward.
This is the cheapest transformation in the house and the most reliable. A room lit only from the centre — one bright fitting overhead — pushes all its shadow to the edges and makes the corners feel even deader. But a lamp glowing softly in each far corner does the opposite: it pulls the light outward, and suddenly the room has depth, warmth and a sense of evening about it. Warm bulbs, low light, and if you can, a lamp on a timer so the corner glows the moment it starts getting dark.
The reading corner
Once there's light out there, you may as well sit in it. A comfortable chair angled across the corner — not squared up to the walls, but set on the diagonal, facing back into the room — with a lamp beside it and a cushion in it, and you've made a proper reading spot out of what was nothing at all.
The diagonal is the secret. A chair pushed flat and straight into a corner looks stranded; the same chair turned to sit across the angle, with a little table and a lamp at its shoulder, looks intentional and inviting. It softens the hard geometry of the corner and gives you somewhere genuinely lovely to sit — often the nicest seat in the room, tucked away from the through-traffic with its own pool of light.
The alcove: a corner with a job
If your corner is really an alcove — a recess beside a chimney breast, a nook left by the architecture — treat it as a gift. Alcoves are the perfect spot for a built-in bench and a small table, turning an awkward recess into a snug little place to sit or to eat. A run of shelves above, a cushioned bench below, a table pulled up to it: it's the cosiest arrangement in the house, and it works precisely because the walls wrap around you on three sides.
Built-in is best where you can, because it makes the alcove look original to the house. But even a freestanding bench and a small table, nudged into the recess, does most of the job.
The perch, for when the room fills up
Not every corner needs a whole armchair. Sometimes the cleverest thing to tuck into one is a single armless chair or a little slipper seat — something low and light that gives you somewhere to perch when the room fills up with people, and looks pretty the rest of the time.
An armless chair takes up almost no visual space, so it never crowds the corner the way a big upholstered piece can. And when you're entertaining and every seat's taken, that quiet extra perch in the corner earns its keep. Look for something with a bit of shape to it — a caned chair, a painted bedroom chair, a small vintage side chair — so that even empty it's doing decorative work.
Soften it with something living
The finishing touch, and the one people forget: a bit of green. A tall plant, a big branch in a jug, an urn of foliage set on the floor — something living in the corner softens all that hard architecture and stops the angle reading as bare. Greenery blurs the sharp meeting of the walls, fills the awkward height, and brings a little movement and life to the stillest part of the room. Where a corner feels stark, a plant is almost always the answer.
Work them as a set
One last thought. Corners work best considered together, as a set of four, rather than one at a time. A lit corner here, a reading chair there, a plant in the third, a console and a lamp in the fourth — worked around the room, they balance one another and pull the whole space into shape. The eye travels from one to the next around the edges, and the room feels held, framed, complete.
Decorate from the edges in. Get the corners right and the middle looks after itself.
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*The pieces a good corner wants — a small lamp with an aged base, a caned chair with a bit of shape, an urn for the greenery, a little table for the diagonal — are exactly the sort of thing you find rather than order. Browse the collection at buson.com.au/collections/smalls