A description of a room...

The room was big, probably about the size of a double garage. It was a confusing collection of different and competing influences, and seemed to bear the hallmarks of a number of different owners, designers, and tenants. The room was like a physical manifestation of those stories children write in primary school, where each student writes one line of the story, using only the preceding line as a guide. These type of stories are always immensely popular with young children due to the disjointed and often hilarious plot shifts the line-by-line construction creates. The effect, however, is less hilarious when reproduced visually. Rather than creating a whimsical atmosphere, the Chinese Whispers design approach had a slightly disconcerting effect. The room wasn't particularly dirty, nor was anything inside it cheap, but the way each piece of furniture combined with the various colour schemes and fittings hinted at an almost sadistic madness, or at the very least, a profound and disturbing indifference to one's surroundings.
It seemed the architect had envisioned the apartment as a monument to minimalist living. If you could somehow shut out the shrieking, battling aesthetics cluttering the room and imagine it completely empty, it would seem the work of a moment to throw in an angular red leather couch, a throw rug and some scatter cushions to create the ideal, impersonal space demanded by today's childless professional couples. This modern, streamlined vision of domestic living had, however, been roundly ignored by the person who had installed the room's light fittings, opting for a gilt chandelier in place of the architect's discreet LED downlights that would have cast their cold, bright light across the room's bare bricks. The chandelier held six lightbulbs pointing upwards towards the wood panelled ceiling, which had appeared to have been installed by a drunken carpenter on the afternoon following an unsuccesful custody hearing. The light hitting the yellow pine boards cast a dim, orangy light across the room better suited to the set of Apocalypse Now than a trendy, inner-west apartment.
The chandelier was the room's only source of light. At some point someone, perhaps in an attempt to protect people from inadvertently glancing in and seeing the room, had ordered the large windows on the left hand side of the room covered with curtains. Instead of a plain colour in keeping with the bare lines of the room's interior, a set of "modern" print curtains had been ordered. The pattern consisted of red triangles and black lines on a white background, offset by huge black tassles at the bottom. Friends of the fabric's designer later looked back on the design as the artist's first cry for help before his descent into an alcohol fuelled depression. But here, they had been selected because the black lines "picked up the black of the new coffee table, don't you reckon?". The coffee table was a monstrosity. A product of the "natural wood" movement of the early-1990s, it was essentially a eucalyptus trunk sliced in half lengthways. It was propped up by two "legs" at each end, which were more like rectangles with semicircular grooves cut in them. In a last schizophrenic twist, the whole thing had been stained a deep black. Thus it now lurked, sprawled down the centre of the room, acting upon the room's orange light in the same way little packets of silica gel work on moisture in shoeboxes.
There are some things that should never be sat on. The laps of strange men at the park, for instance. The long, Balinese five-seat couch running the length of the right hand wall was another. Consisting entirely of bamboo rods and leather ties, it seemed to be involved in a tense standoff with the coffee table. The two pieces of furniture clashed so badly it was hard not to imagine them as Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, facing off across the main street of a deserted town. Between them, they covered about 75% of the room's floorspace, meaning that to cross the room to get to the television, one would have to cut through the crackling electricity the horrible tension between the two pieces had created- an electricity that gave the impression that each piece was straining against inertia, trying vainly to leap onto the other and throttle it.
Upon arriving at the television, one's already frayed nerves would be stretched to full capacity on observing that the $15,000 plasma screen sat directly on an Edwardian sideboard. The television had been bolted to the back piece of the sideboard like an eviction notice on a Housing Commission door. It seemed the kind of person who would bolt a state of the art television to a 120-year-old piece of mahogany furniture would also be capable of other acts of savagery, like taping a cat to a dog and feeling satisfied that both were improved. Looking at the television/sideboard hybrid made you want to look over your shoulder to make sure you weren't being watched.
Above the television, which in order to watch you would have to sit either on the end of the coffee table or sit on the couch with your head turned 90 degrees, was the first of a series of photographic prints that appeared on every wall. Perhaps in a final, desperate attempt at unity, the posters were all from the popular "lighthouses getting worked over by the sea" range. In all, there were eight nicely framed prints around the room, providing a bizarre nautical element as well as being the only wall covering within the room. The only covering that is, unless you counted the black tape that had been used to cover the exposed wires of the television's surround sound system. A hulking speaker, obviously hideously expensive, perched in each corner of the room, visually supported by a black branch of wire-hiding tape. Pushed up against the back wall opposite the television, clearly placed there by someone maniacally giggling having given up the will to live comfortably, was the skeletal figure of a disused and dust-covered Total Gym 1000.
The owners of the room were home, but weren't sitting in the living room tonight. It was a living room in the literal sense of the word, in that it had become an organism- a presence- within the house. The owners had adapted to living with the room. They had been stupid enough to oversee its final creation, but weren't silly enough to try to endure its effects. They ignored it like the mentally disabled child of an early 19th Century aristocratic family, opting instead to eat their dinner standing up in the apartment's galley kitchen before spending the night watching television in bed.