Filling your house with furniture is nice and making sure that everything matches will bring your house together but there is one step beyond even matching your furniture to the design of your house. Make your furniture into a part of your house. Bookcases, bunk beds, television and even seating can become a part of your surroundings with a fair bit of effort or basic skills with a checkbook.
You can also convert pre-existing spaces into new storage. I live in an old apartment that originally had an ironing board built into the kitchen wall. With the ironing board taken out and some simple shelves installed I converted it into a perfect spice rack and freed up a lot of space in my cabinets.
With metal bunk beds or a cool loft bunk bed it’s really just a matter of extending the wall to encompass the frame of the piece. Make sure to match any woodwork that you use to the original molding of the house so that the transition is smooth and seems natural.
I have seen some houses in which a wall has been extended past its original frame, a sturdy platform is built to support a mattress and box spring and then the wall extensions are converted into cabinets. This new “bed” looks like it was a design element intended as a part of the hose by the original architect and comes off as very classy. If you plan to do this with bunk beds I suggest hiring a well-known carpenter who can guarantee that the second level of beds will be entirely sturdy and load bearing well beyond what you think it might need to support.
Integrating a TV into a wall is similar to installing a recessed medicine cabinet. Essentially, you cut a properly sized hole into the dry wall, secure the TV to the studs properly and rebuild the wall around the edge of the TV. To finish, you can either carefully edge the new drywall to the television or you can buy a large picture frame and mask the hole entirely. This is best achieved with a flat screen television but I have seen some people use full sized TVs by having the back extend into a closet or crawl space that is not going to be seen. This gives the illusion of a flat screen TV.
To further streamline your house you can remove doors between adjoining rooms then completely remove the hinges from the frames. Properly filling and painting the screw holes left from the hinges is key to making this seem intentional and visually pleasing.
