The living room has always been the most loaded room in the home: the space that has to accommodate the broadest range of activities across the household’s different members and their varying schedules. What has changed significantly in recent years is the intensity of that loading. More work happens in living rooms than it did a decade ago. More informal socialising has moved back from restaurants and cafes to domestic settings. More children do school-related activities in the shared areas of the family home rather than exclusively in their own rooms. The room that was once primarily for watching television in the evening is now also an informal office, a homework space, a reading room, and a venue for hosting.
The furniture that occupies this room, particularly the sofa as its dominant and most used piece, has to respond to this expanded brief without the design becoming complicated or the room feeling like a compromise between incompatible functions.
Research on how home design priorities have shifted
A January 2026 study published in Buildings used image analysis of residential interiors collected from social platforms to quantify how living space design shifted between the pre- and post-pandemic periods. The research found that living rooms showed the most significant increase in openness and comfort attributes after the pandemic, with flexibility and diversity also increasing markedly across all residential space types. The shift reflects a broader change in how people use and prioritise the spaces in their homes: the living room, which was once primarily a social and leisure space, has become a multifunctional zone that needs to perform across a wider range of daily activities.
The practical implications of this research for living room furnishing decisions are direct. A sofa chosen only for its appearance when the room is at rest will fail in a room that has taken on this expanded functional brief. It needs to be genuinely comfortable for extended sitting in different postures, generous enough to accommodate multiple people simultaneously, and covered in a material that holds up to the higher frequency and diversity of use that this multifunctional role produces.
Why does the Kivik suit this expanded living room role?
The IKEA Kivik was designed for exactly the conditions that the current living room brief describes. Its seat depth is generous enough to allow extended sitting in a reclined position as well as upright, which means it accommodates reading, working on a laptop, or resting without the occupant having to adjust their position every twenty minutes. Its low, broad profile makes the room feel more open rather than more occupied, which is important in living rooms that are now doing more work and risk feeling busier as a result.
The Kivik’s sectional configuration options allow the seating to be scaled to the household’s actual needs: a chaise extension for solo lounging, multiple sections for households that regularly host or have children and teenagers sharing the space. The modularity means the sofa can adapt as the household’s composition changes, without requiring replacement of the whole piece.
For households that want to maintain the Kivik’s performance while upgrading or refreshing its surface material, slipcovers designed for IKEA Kivik sofas in natural fabrics allow the cover to be changed independently of the frame. The sofa’s structural qualities, which are the reason it suits a multifunctional living room, are preserved. The surface material, which determines both the room’s visual character and the daily tactile experience of the piece, can be selected and updated to suit the household’s actual priorities.
Cover choice and the multifunctional living room
A sofa that is in daily heavy use across multiple activities needs a cover that performs across all of them. The material requirements for a cover that sees daily work sessions, homework, hosting, and evening relaxation are more demanding than those for a sofa used primarily for television watching in the evenings.
The key performance variables for a cover in this kind of room are washability, durability under extended contact, resistance to pilling and surface breakdown, and the ability to maintain its visual quality across repeated use and washing cycles. Natural linen and dense cotton satisfy all four of these requirements more consistently than synthetic alternatives, because their fibre structure is inherently more durable under friction and their material properties improve with washing rather than degrade.
Colour choices for rooms that are used throughout the day
A living room that is now used for morning work sessions, midday family time, afternoon homework, and evening relaxation needs a sofa cover colour that reads well under natural daylight, artificial light, and the mixed conditions of transitional hours. Saturated or high-contrast colours that look strong in strong light can read as oppressive under lamplight. Pure neutrals that read as calm during the day can feel cold and lifeless in the evening.
Warm neutrals in natural linen, the ivories, warm taupes, and dusty naturals that characterise undyed or lightly pigmented European flax, perform across this range better than most alternatives. They hold warmth under lamplight and read as calm and considered in daylight. They do not date or clash with changing accessories and decorative objects in the way that more specific tonal choices can.
Arranging the seating zone for multiple simultaneous uses
The layout of seating in a living room that serves multiple simultaneous functions is more consequential than it is in a room with a single primary use. A layout optimised for television viewing is not optimised for hosting a conversation group, which is not optimised for solo-focused work. The arrangement that most successfully accommodates all three is one that gives the sofa a clear primary orientation while allowing the secondary seating to be positioned flexibly in relation to it.
For a Kivik configuration with a chaise, the sofa and chaise section together define a primary seating zone that can face the television for evening use. Secondary chairs positioned at angles to the sofa can create a conversation group without requiring the sofa to move. A small working surface, a side table or a low coffee table, at the non-chaise end of the sofa, provides the practical support for a laptop or notebooks during working sessions without structuring the room around a fixed work zone.
The rug beneath the seating group should be large enough that the sofa’s front legs rest on it, which defines the zone and anchors the arrangement. A natural fibre rug in a warm tone relates to the sofa cover’s material character and helps the room’s different seating elements read as a coherent group rather than a collection of independent pieces.
Maintaining quality in a room under heavier use
A living room that is used more intensively than it was previously will show the effects of that use on its surfaces more quickly. A cover that was adequate under lighter use may not maintain its quality under the expanded daily load of a multifunctional room.
The practical solution is to choose a cover from the outset that is rated for heavy domestic use, and to maintain it on a washing schedule that prevents accumulation of surface particulates rather than addressing them only after visible deterioration occurs. For a natural linen or cotton cover, this means:
• Washing at 40 to 60 degrees Celsius every four to six weeks during periods of heavy use, or more frequently in households with young children
• Rotating cushion covers between positions to even out wear patterns across the piece
• Air-drying rather than tumble-drying where possible, which preserves the fabric’s dimensional stability and extends the cover’s effective lifespan
• Addressing spills promptly rather than allowing them to set, which reduces the need for intensive cleaning treatments that can affect the fabric’s surface structure over time
A sofa that is both correctly chosen for the room’s actual use patterns and covered in a material suited to those patterns will maintain its quality across the extended daily demands that the modern living room places on it. This is not an exceptional standard. It is the natural result of choosing well at the outset and maintaining the piece in the way its materials require.
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