Reflections on Corners

Corners of rooms can, at times, be tricky. Depending on the layout of the room and the furniture placement, one can end up with dead space in the corner. It's kind of like an awkward silence in a room.

It's an issue that I'm currently dealing with in my study. On one of the long walls, there is a sofa, and against the adjoining wall, there is a sliding glass door and enough wall space for a small chest. The result is that the corner looks empty and boxed in. Screens can be a great option for hiding desolate corners, but unfortunately there just isn't enough space for one in my study. I think that I found the answer to my particular problem. I plan to display a tall painting, one done by my sister, on an easel in the corner. Now the only glitch is finding a decent looking easel that goes with the rest of the room, but that's an issue for another post.

I suppose that because this design challenge has been on my mind lately, I've become attuned to how others have dealt with corners. And one of the more interesting solutions that I've seen is the use of mirror to obscure the corners altogether. The most common approach to mirror is to sheath entire walls in it. In the photo at top, designer Louis Tregre mirrored chimney breast and wall in squares of mirror and extended it to window. It worked well because it minimized the jogs of the chimney breast, niche, and support column, making the wall seem a bit more uniform.



I am absolutely smitten with this image of an apartment decorated by the late David Barrett. Barrett mirrored an awkward corner, then extended the reflective surface by placing a mirrored screen next to the mirrored corner. And if that wasn't enough, he used a mirrored cube table and a mirrored pedestal in this corner as well.



The late T. Gordon Little mirrored the support column in the corner of his Plaza Towers living room. To be honest, I don't think that the mirror really does an effective job at hiding the column (and perhaps that wasn't Little's objective), but I do like the way it looks. The mirror added some shimmer to what could have been a clunky corner.




A more restrained use of mirror is seen here in the London flat of Walter Lees. At first it seems a little odd to use two slivers of mirror to decorate a corner, but here, I think it worked. If Lees had not balanced out the mirror with drawings and sofas on either side, the mirrored corner might have seemed too forced and obvious.


Tregre and Barrett images from House Beautiful, January 1971. Little image from Southern Accents, Winter 1977.