White living room ideas not only look clean and modern but also act as a blank canvas to showcase your personal design style. A white ceiling and walls can clear the way for a beautiful area rug or a large-scale art print to be the focal point of the room. You can even choose colorful statement furniture to stand out against the white in your living room.
While white might seem like a simple color to use, there are hundreds of white paint colors available. It can be difficult to determine which is right for your home, but keep in mind that whites with a yellow undertone will work better with wood furnishings and warmer colors like red and orange, while whites with a bluer tint pair well with grays and purples, stainless steel, and chrome.
Ultimately, a white living room can make a home look more organized and polished and help minimize clutter. To inspire your next living room refresh, we're sharing our best white living room ideas, which can be easily adapted to fit your aesthetic.
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Neutral White Living Room Idea
Complement white living room walls with neutral furniture and accents, such as a light gray area rug. The stand outs in this room are two leather armchairs, but they pair well with the subdued, neutral tones used throughout the room.
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Elegant Living Room
This white living room's rich emerald green sofa instantly elevates the space and adds effortless elegance. Other luxurious details, like vintage armchairs and a plush white area rug, complete the sophisticated design.
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White Living Room with Dark Floors
Dark wood floors can add an interesting contrast to a white living room idea, but it’s also possible that they’ll make the room look smaller. If you have darker floors, you can easily get around this by placing a large area rug in the room, like this textured option, which will bring light back into the space.
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Living Room Fireplace Decor
Update a fireplace to give it a more modern look by surrounding it with a simple white frame. This relatively easy white living room idea helps the fireplace match the surrounding shelves and light colors throughout the room without significant renovations.
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Seasonal White Living Room Ideas
You can easily change your white living room to match the current season by swapping out simple decor items, like faux branches and other accents. This space matches the autumn colors outside with brown velvet throw pillows and large, abstract art in shades of brown.
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Highlighted Wood Floors
Blonde wood floors are a good white living room idea because they complement the colors used on the walls and ceiling. They also make the room feel more organic and natural, which is helped even further by adding large potted plants.
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White Living Room Shelves
White living room walls are a perfect backdrop if you have other decor items you want to showcase. This room uses small shelves to create gallery-style walls lined with framed photos and prints, with white acting as a neutral background color.
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Statement Furniture Showcase
Easily create contrast in a white living room by choosing dark furniture, such as this navy blue couch. As your sense of style changes or if you choose to update the furniture, it’ll still work in the neutral color scheme.
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Statement-Making Fireplace
If you want to break up white walls, consider painting or finishing your fireplace in a different color, like this gray concrete. When paired with exposed wood beams, it adds enough contrast to the room to keep the white paneled walls and ceiling from feeling bare.
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White Living Room Idea with Vaulted Ceilings
A grand vaulted ceiling opens up this living room space, and painting it white helps emphasize the airiness in the room. Since the wood floors, leather chairs, and gray couches ground the room, the white ceiling and walls help add brightness.
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Colorful White Living Room Idea
A huge benefit of a white living room is that it provides a neutral palette to showcase many colors that might otherwise clash. This room may have white walls, but it has plenty of color thanks to a bold blue door, blue area rug, and multicolored throw pillows.
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Decorate with Blue Accents
With lots of natural light, a predominantly white living room idea emphasizes the brightness of this space. However, modern touches, like the black fireplace and small touches of blue throughout the room on throw pillows and blankets, make the space feel polished and cozy.
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Modern White Living Room Ideas
Accent your white living room with bold colors and patterns to keep it totally modern. The bright, abstract art print adds brilliant color to the space, while the black-and-white diamond area rug adds contrast and visual interest.
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White Living Room with Dark Furniture
A black couch is a great contrast to this white living room idea. The darker couch also ties in with other elements of the room, such as the wood-framed mirror above the fireplace and the wood end table in the corner.
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High Living Room Ceilings
Using white paint in your living room brightens the space and enhances any natural light. This is especially true in this room with higher-than-average ceilings, which is grounded with matching yellow chairs and a gray sofa.
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Pink Living Room Decor
If you want to incorporate the millennial pink trend into your living room, pairing it with white can help it look classy and elegant. Pink accents on the chairs, rug, and throw pillows also complement the boho style of the furniture and light fixtures in the room.
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Maximalist White Living Room Ideas
One way to keep your white living room idea from being too sterile is to fill it with statement pieces, like a large leather sofa and wooden shelves. This allows you to bring more color into the room with decorative items like vases, throw pillows, blankets, and large plants.
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Living Room Gallery Wall
Use the blank canvas that white walls present to display an assortment of pictures and decorative items. This white living room is livened up with a gallery wall filled with botanical art and woven baskets.
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Colorful White Living Room
Though this living room has white walls and a white ceiling, thanks to the variety of color from the furniture and decor, it doesn’t feel like a completely white room. The orange-yellow and purple area rug adds richness to the color scheme, and complements the blue-cushioned chairs in the center of the room.
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Relaxing White Living Room
Some white living rooms can feel bright and bold, but choosing a softer white for the walls, like this room, will help create a more relaxing yet still sophisticated look. Soft colors complement the slightly yellow-white in this room, such as a light gray couch and pale wood coffee table.
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Patterned Accents
Use a white living room to show off one of your favorite patterned accents like this rug. The geometric design instantly draws the eye thanks to contrasting black and white colors, and it matches the shapes used in the macrame wall hanging to create a cohesive look.
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Sophisticated White Living Room Idea
Neutral white walls and a light area rug covering a dark wood floor really help the sophisticated furniture in this room stand out. The blue patterned couch immediately catches the eye, and a chandelier-style light fixture helps emphasize the easy elegance.
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White Fireplace Ideas
If your living room has a fireplace but you’re thinking of painting the room white, you can update the fireplace to match. In this room, the fireplace is covered with white wood panels, which helps it blend into the rest of the room and avoids breaking up the stretch of white walls with a tall column of brick.
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White Living Room with Dark Built-Ins
Pair the two most popular contrasting colors—black and white—to create a sleek, modern living room. The white walls in this room act as a counterpoint to the wall of black shelves along one wall, plus the dark trim and light fixtures.
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Open Concept Living Room
White walls can be a smart choice if your living room is open concept because the neutral color can naturally transition into other areas of your home, like a stairwell or loft. This idea leaves the living room primarily white, then adds contrast at the staircase with wood treads and black risers.
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White Living Room Ceiling
This white living room idea includes blue details, such as the area rug and art print, to help transition into the next part of the house. Just outside the living room is a navy counter space with stools, which helps connect the living room's color scheme to the rest of the home.
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Embrace Wood Accents
Add warmth to a white living room idea by contrasting the walls with wood floors and ceiling panels. If you’re hesitant to go completely white in a room, leaving a few elements such as wood furniture, trim, panels, or even picture frames can help prevent the space from feeling cold.
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Living Room Area Rug
Adding a large area rug is an easy way to add lots of color to a white living room. The blue rug in this room provides just enough balance to the white walls to keep them from feeling sterile and provides a matching accent for other details, like throw pillows and planters.
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White Built-In Shelves
Though the main color in this living room is white, built-in shelves covering one wall provide lots of opportunities to add color through decor. Potted plants, blue velvet chairs, and a gold coffee table all help to enliven this modern living room.
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Wood Paneled Ceiling
Panels in both the living room and dining room help transition between the two in this open-concept home. In the living room, the ceiling panels are painted white to add brightness and cohesion, while the dining room leaves the wood ceiling and trim natural for a smooth connection between the two.
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