Single wide mobile home living rooms are a bit difficult to furnish and decorate. In most models the kitchen, dining room, and living room all share a single space, meaning that single wides had open floor plans before open floor plans became cool.
But an open floor plan isn’t so easy when it comes to placing furniture. So we went on a hunt to see how other single wide homeowners had tackled design in their homes. Let’s just say we hit the jackpot!
Single Wide Floor Plans
In the South, single wide mobile homes usually have living rooms in the middle of the home along with the kitchen and dining space. The master bedroom will be on the ‘back’ end and the kids rooms on the other. It’s a smart layout and gives the family more privacy. It also puts the majority of the home’s weight in the middle of the chassis which reduces stress during transport.
Single wide living rooms are square or rectangular and have 2 or 3 points of entry. All of that traffic flow will make furniture placement challenging.
Consider your Traffic Patterns
Single wides usually have 3 points of access which includes a front door, a hallway, and a kitchen. Since all three points must be easily accessible it drastically limits how we can place furniture. Putting the furniture up against the walls is the most common furniture layout for single wides but as you’ll see below you do have other options.
Establish a Focal Point
Decorating a room and arranging furniture is easier when you establish a focal point first.
The majority of these single wide mobile home living rooms have an obvious focal point. The most popular focal points are bookcases, fireplaces, and accent walls. The most popular wall for the focal point is the shorter wall beside the hallway.
Scale and Balance
Scale and balance are important in home decor and design. .
The scale of a room simply means that the furniture should be the right size for the room and there should be balance . Some designers recommend the rule of 3s and that the majority of your furniture should not be above the bottom third of your wall height.
A balanced room will have the largest pieces of furniture symmetrically placed or opposite each other.
Yes, our furniture placement options are limited but we can still have a gorgeous living room in our mobile homes, The 25 beautiful single wide mobile home living rooms prove it.
Cozy Charm
Jennifer Simmons completely remodeled her 1964 Chateau mobile home last year.
Create Conversation Areas
This single wide has an addition built onto it but it’s still a single wide. The owner did a great job creating a little conversation area by placing two chairs in front of the sofa. And those bright red bar stools are perfect!
Budget Focal Point
Focal points don’t have to cost a lot. The bookshelves were $29.99 at Big Lots and the fireplace was found on Craigslist (PS this is my little 1978 single wide and where Mobile Home Living® began).
Black Beauty
Many interior designers will tell you that dark colors don’t work for small spaces but that’s not necessarily true. You just need to be careful about how you do it. Learn more about interior design tips for mobile homes here.
The focal point in this room is the black accent wall. The loveseat adds depth and the lamp and plant balance each other perfectly.
Charming and Comfortable
This single wide mobile home living room is gorgeous! Painting the window wall white and the other a muted green is a smart way to add color.
Related: 15 Great Mobile Home Remodels
Bright Beauty
This single wide is located in Malibu’s Paradise Cove Mobile Home Park where Minnie Driver and few other movie stars live.
IIt’s simple and yet beautiful.
Cozy Cool
The ceiling in this single wide living room is great! The owner created balance by placing 2 chairs across from the sofa.
Cool Canadian
Canada’s single wides are wider than American single wides. The extra space really helps. The focal point here is the TV with the large prints above it. We featured a couple of Canadian manufactured homes here.
Pretty as a Picture
This living room is simple and puts the owners love of photography on full display.
Magic Mirror
Kathy’s 1978 single wide is a beauty inside and out. This is her vacation home that sits beside a beautiful river. I’d call this style ‘classical library.’
Kathy has added plenty of shelving and comfortable seating for those cozy nights by the river.
Cottage Beauty
I love everything about this home! The two sofas on each wall balance the space perfectly. And there’s no need for a coffee table when you have plenty of end tables. Coffee tables aren’t always required.
Mid-Century Marvelous
The new single wide mobile homes in California are so cool. The accent wall is simple but it works. The accessories really pull this room together.
Savannah Simplicity
This is a new manufactured home but I’m including for one reason – the wood beams. It can be difficult to give separate space with open-space floor plans but beams can do it.
Cozy Classic
Dianna Woods let me feature her gorgeous 1964 mobile home makeover years ago. She is so creative and clearly has a knack for design. With such a small space (the whole house is less than 700 square feet) she made sure everything was easy to move around and serve two purposes whenever possible.
1962 Skyline
This mid-century modern style vintage mobile home is so cool! It has an accent wall, clean lines, balance and simple furniture placement.
Clean and Crisp
Annie paid $10,000 for this 1980 Skyline model single wide and spent another $5,000 to remodel it. The original mirrors make the room feel larger and helps bounce light around.
Simple furniture is cozy and clean. Round coffee tables are perfect for small space with the traffic flow going by it.
Simple Mid-Modern
This living room is gorgeous! I think our friend Steven shared it on Facebook page. The fireplace is a great focal point. The furniture placement is perfect since space is at a premium.
Colorful Cottage
All of these single wide mobile home living rooms are great! I especially love this one though. The sectional separates the living room and the kitchen visually but not so much spatially.
Eclectic Elegance
I’m a sucker for gallery walls! Carolyn shared her eclectic single wide story with us years ago.
Coastal Cottage
This living room proves you don’t always need a sofa. This space is separated in to a few different areas. The office desk is behind the love seat on the back wall and a conversation set on the left. There’s plenty of room for activities!
French Country Cottage
Felicia created a gorgeous living room in her newer single wide manufactured home. The uses the hallway as the focal point and balances it out with the matching mirrors. She doesn’t have a coffee table so there’s no traffic interference.
Visually Pleasing
Single wide mobile home living rooms are so simple but there are so many different ways to decorate them.
Single wides have open floor plans where the dining room, living room, and kitchen are all one space. Placing the sofa in the middle helps divide the space.
Modern Cabin
This accent wall is amazing! The wood warms up the cold gray and the bookcase on the left balances out the hallways.
The furniture placement is simple and cozy.
Modern Chic
This 1995 single wide is a beautiful home! They nudged all the furniture on the left of the home to allow for easy entry at the front door. The accent wall has a bench and plenty of storage.
What Living Room?
I wanted to share this Phillips’ gorgeous new single wide because it’s so unique. After they turned a bedroom into a cool media room they decided they would rather have a large kitchen and dining space over a small living room. The area that was intended for a dining table is where the large kitchen island stands.
The living room is now their dining room!
Use Every Inch Possible in Single Wide Mobile Home Living Rooms
Single wide mobile home living rooms can be short on space but that doesn’t mean they can’t be stylish. When space is limited you need every piece in the room to serve more than one purpose.
The best tip anyone can give about mobile home decorating is to do whatever makes you happy! A home should be something you are proud of, regardless of how big it is, how old it is, or how much it cost.
Thank you for reading Mobile Home Living®!
My husband and I purchased a single wide mobile home this year our first together a 1987 a lot of work was needed to be done and so we did. How can I enter some photos of what we’ve done? I love these photos we’re very proud of what we have done together these photos you’ve shown are simply gorgeous what I do I’m very passionate about I would love to show what we’ve done.
Hi Deborah!
Please email me at crystaladkins@mobilehomeliving.org. I’d be delighted to share your home! Thank you so much!
Hi Deborah!
Please email me at crystaladkins@mobilehomeliving.org/.I look forward to seeing and sharing your home. I hope I hear from you soon!
Great article! We just purchased a single wide mfg home in Sturgeon Bay, Wi – we love it but yes very small – uner 400 sq feet. Do you think it would visually make the place smaller if we kept carpeting in bedroom but lvp flooring in the rest of the place ( bath, kitchen and family room)? Or should we do the same flooring throughout the place in order to have the consistency create a larger space visually?
This truly helped but still unsure about a few things. I just restently moved in my single wide after becoming a widow. None of these looked anything like my new home. But I plan on trying a few suggestions. Thank you
My living room has paneling on 3 walls. I have an scent wall I want to paint but don’t know what color. Would go with my other walls
finally the example I needed came up at the end! i am moving to a single wide, and wanted some ideas, but i already had this idea in mind: make a dining room out of the living room, and having a large kitchen as well, while relegating all living-room items to the largest bedroom. I am proud now because you said it’s so unique to do something like that lol. would have liked to see more examples of that, plus, a picture showing the actual eating area, would have been nice for that example. almost every single other living space you showed, looked way too cluttered, overdone, and unliveable to me. boring, predictable, and too uncomfortable to have a good time in (except I too enjoy the little roof/eave thing inside that one house!) one of them even had a like 1.5′-wide pathway into the room. even a skinny person won’t want to squeeze through that to get to your couch! it is just too much. I’m on a minimalist kick though. thanks for the article it was fun no matter what!!!
btw I did not mean “YOUR” couch, I meant whoever’s place that was lol :] no misunderstandings I enjoyed your article!
Being that your mfg is 400sq feet and in Sturgeon Bay, keep your bedroom as comfortable and warm as you need it to be. We put vinyl flooring throughout our SW and I put down area rugs in every room, however; I am in the southern part of the U.S. where it does not get as cold as WI. (I lived in WI for 60 years an also had a summer retreat in Sturgeon Bay).
Just purchased some property that had a single wide on it as a bonus but it is a total gut job. Been surfing the web for ideas and your site always comes up. So many great ideas! Already started making a storage coffee table. Closing is in 2 weeks! Saving a lot of your photos so I can design the space. Will keep you posted.
Great rooms with stylish personalized elements. I downsized 3 years ago to a 14ft wide and here are my trial and error tips.
Use black somehow, my picture frames are the same and it balances the TV abyss.
Furniture with legs let’s the eye get all the way to the wall.
Don’t block the window and place seating to see out it.
Lose the chandelier in favour of a flushmount, it limits the placement of the dining table. Try pendants over the peninsula.
A glass coffee table visually keeps the room open.