A well designed and laid-out home is the gift that keeps on giving. This is particularly so when considering common areas like the living room where everyone gets together to enjoy each other’s company and consume entertainment. With this idea in mind, today I hope to inspire you with a few very nice ideas for redesigning your living room as a gift to the whole family. I’ll be looking at products such as Electric Fireplaces, Mounted TVs, Smart Lighting, and more, to make everyone’s life just a little bit easier and more comfortable. Read on if you’d enjoy having a modern living space that’s comfortable and attractive to everyone in the family.

 

An Electric Fireplace to warm the heart—and the living room!

I’m fairly convinced that pretty much everyone enjoys cozying up in front of a nice, warm fireplace. That’s why a new electric fireplace is the very first item on my list.

For instance, the Costway 26″ 750W-1500W Fireplace Electric Embedded Insert Heater w/Remote is an absolute beauty. And it’s convenient!

living room

With one of these amazing inserts installed, you’ll not only enjoy ongoing warmth and beauty, but you’ll also have the benefit of 5 different modes to adjust the the speed and brightness of the flame, a handy remote control, 4 flame and flame bed colour options, and a whole lot more. These fireplaces are efficient space savers that add tremendously to the aesthetic appeal of your home without the nasty smoke or risk of burning the place down!

 

Adorn your living room with a new Mounted TV

Another great way to enhance your living room in a way that the whole family will love and appreciate is by adding a brand new Mounted TV. Not only does Best Buy carry a fine selection of Big Screen TVs, but they also have a number of easy to install TV Mounts available.

I installed and reviewed one of these mounts myself a couple years ago. It’s no longer available at Best Buy or I would link to it, but what I can tell you is that it was a quick and easy installation, and it’s still holding our TV to the wall today. It lets us tilt and turn the TV every which way, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to own and use!

Then there is the TV itself. Once again Best Buy gives you a number of great options. They’ve got everything from small, modest TVs to those as big as 70+ inches. These TVs also have a ton of great features.

The LG 55″ 4K UHD HDR OLED webOS Smart TV that I’m showing above is a great example. It has 3840 x 2160 native resolution on its 4K UHD screen, HDR technology for an increased colour spectrum, Dolby Atmos with multi-dimensional surround sound, and a ton of other high-end features that make it an absolute pleasure to own and watch. If you want to give the gift of an amazing living room re-do to your family this year, a TV like this one is certainly a can’t miss prospect!

 

Smart Lights in the living room

Installing beautiful and convenient Smart Lighting is yet another way to dress up any room in your home. This is particularly true of the various Panel Lights that are out there.

For instance, consider what you could do with the Nanoleaf Shapes Hexagon Light Panels Smarter Kit. This 7 panel kit is just one of Nanoleaf’s panel light shape options—they also have squares and triangles. With just a couple of these kits, you can really go to town decorating your living room in a way that’s truly unique and fascinating.

living room

Everyone I’ve talked to that’s tried Nanoleaf panel lights has absolutely loved them. They affix to the wall with special double-sided tape that allows for easy removal and replacement, offer over 16 million different colour options for you to choose from, and they can even react to sound (such as music) to really rock the house!

There are also a number of fun and easy ways to control your lights—through the Nanoleaf App, voice based commands, and even by touch. Of course, you can arrange and display them in any way that you see fit. They’re truly a great gift choice for creative individuals or as a living room enhancement for the whole family to enjoy.

 

Add a Smart Display for voice based control

Finally, I’d like to suggest the ultimate Smart Home convenience—a new Smart Display! Smart Displays are an amazing piece of technology that combine the best aspects of a smart speaker and a TV or computer screen. In other words, Smart Displays provide access to one of today’s most popular smart voice assistants (usually either Amazon Alexa, the Google Assistant, or Apple’s Siri) and combine that functionality with a screen with which to see everything that a standard smart speaker simply cannot show you.

living room

Shown here is the Lenovo 7″ Smart Display, which is just one of many excellent examples of a Smart Display. I’m currently testing this particular display for a review that’s coming very soon to the Best Buy Canada Blog, so stay tuned for that. In the mean time, here’s just a little bit of what one of these devices can do:

“Among the many things you can do with the Lenovo 7″ Display are check local weather and traffic reports, find out the latest news and sports scores, set reminders and add upcoming events to your calendar, watch movies and live TV shows (or your favourite YouTube videos), peruse recipes and follow along with their instructions to cook a delicious meal, listen to popular music while watching their official videos, or browse your photo library for a stroll down memory lane—just to name a few of the exciting things you can do with this cool new device.”

The above passage is directly quoted from my own forthcoming review, and that doesn’t even give you the half of it. Notice that I didn’t even get to specs in that passage—things like its screen resolution, which version of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi it has, and the fact that it can control over 40,000 other smart devices from a whopping 5,000+ brands.

Above I discussed TV Mounts. Here’s an image to show you what one looks like, though they do come in numerous styles

And the Lenovo 7″ isn’t alone. Many of today’s other Smart Displays, like the Google Nest Hub Smart Display with Google Assistant and the Amazon Echo Show 8 Smart Display with Alexa have most—if not all, of the very same features and benefits that the Lenovo has. In other words, when it comes to Smart Displays, it’s almost impossible to go wrong and make a bad selection. Pretty much anything you can find at Best Buy is sure to make a great living room gift to your whole family!

 

And with that I will end today’s blog and just remind you once again that a gift that everyone in your family will enjoy is really a can’t miss proposition. Explore all your home and lifestyle gift options at Best Buy Canada today, and have a wonderful Holiday Season!

 

Leonard Bond
Leo enjoys writing about everything from secret agents to tech toys and gadgets to professional hockey. Find his reviews and other product related commentary right here on the Best Buy Blog and his latest hockey rants at www.hockeycontroversial.com.