Hi, I'm Shannon from homemadelovely.com and today I'm going to talk to you about a common decorating problem, how to deal with more than one focal point. When you're decorating and arranging a room, you should always have only one focal point. You need to be able to draw the eye into a space and arrange the furniture around this focal point. But what happens when you have more than one? When you have a fireplace and a TV, for example, or a TV and separate built-ins or a fireplace and built-ins, and they both seem like they want to draw attention and be the focal point. Well, the first thing you can do is see if you can combine focal points. For example, in our main living room, we have a fireplace at the end of a long and skinny kind of room. There really is nowhere else to put the TV without totally drawing attention to two completely separate areas of the room. So we compromise on some of the design rules that say a TV should be at a certain height and a certain distance from the couch by putting it on the mantle of the fireplace. This works for us because it keeps one focal point in a long and skinny room that happens to be open to the kitchen, which is always busy with all kinds of things happening over there as well. It just calms the space and keeps it focused in one place. The next thing to do if you can't combine your focal points is to choose which one you want to focus on or the one that you most want to draw attention to. When you do this, you want to keep in mind the main use for the space. So it may be well and good to draw all your attention to a fireplace with a TV off to the side, but if the main thing that you do in that room is watch TV, you're going to want to make the TV the focal point. Now I know most designers will tell you never to do that and the TV shouldn't be that, but I prefer to think of it as practical because if that's what you're using the space for, that's going to be what the focal point is. So once you've chosen a focal point to focus on, you want to draw the eye there with the arrangement of the furniture and other things like the placement of the art and perhaps accent colors and things like that. You can also use color, texture and pattern to draw attention to the focal point that you've chosen to really emphasize. Then you want to de-emphasize the secondary focal point and you can do that also with light, color, texture, pattern and by how you arrange the furniture to focus on the first focal point. You want to do what you can to make that second focal point blend in, keep it neutral, keep decor pieces and accent pieces to a minimum, keep the paint color neutral around that thing. Another option is if you have a large enough space, you can arrange the furniture to actually focus on more than one focal point. So if you have a really large room and there's a fireplace at one end and a TV for example and another part of the space, you can arrange a couple of chairs around the fireplace for people to sit and gather around that and then you can arrange the other furniture around the TV. That only works if you have a big space, of course. So let's talk about a couple of examples. To make a fireplace stand out, you could do that using a large framed statement piece of art. You could cover the fireplace in beautiful stone that's large and bold and bright or you could paint the fireplace mantle in a bright bold color. To downplay a fireplace, you want to keep the paint colors and the decorations really neutral and plain so as not to draw your eye to it. You could also paint it to blend in more with the walls. Another example would be if you wanted to highlight the view outside a window. You could use drapery in a contrasting color to the walls or the window space around it to really draw your eye to it. Or you could even frame the window in contrasting colored molding or trim, again, to draw your eye to the view outside the window. On the contrary, if you live somewhere, say where the view outside your window is another house or another apartment building or something like that, you could downplay and not draw the eye to that window by putting up drapery that blends in with the walls and the space around it so that you're not drawn to looking at that space or that window. You could also, of course, use good old-fashioned shears to downplay that view while still allowing light to shine in. So dealing with multiple focal points is not as difficult as it seems when you really think about what you want to focus on. For more decorating ideas, visit my blog at homeadelovely.com. I'll see you in the next video.