What ever you do don't buy anything else black or dark brown for a dark room. Don't please, paint the room gray. So depressing with all the black/brown. Black-out drapes come in different colors. Paint the walls a pale linen color which will go with everything. Find a color you really like and use that for drapes and a few pillows. Look for a decorative piece for the coffee table. Use a tray with a colored candle and a small plant to give some life to your room. Get rid of the mini-blinds on the door. These are black-out drapes from Target. They block light but are not dark themselves.

Congrats on the new home! My husband and I also purchased our first house recently (been in it about six months) and we're in a similar boat (though with our ratty college furniture instead of hand-me-downs), embarking on an adventure to cohesively decorate the place. While I do have good sense of how to decorate and am not worried about going about it, it would have been really difficult even for me to decorate immediately, so I'm not concerning myself with it (we also have a bunch of house projects in the way). Basically, a good strategy is to take your sweet time and not worry about stuff not matching/ suiting your tastes or the walls not being quite the right color right now. Hone your vision and slowly collect pieces that adhere to it, adding to your spacing or swapping something out. Also, simply live in your space for a while. Be by yourselves, have a friend over, have lots of friends over, host a fancy dinner party and also a casual barbecue. Observe how you and your friends interact with and move around in the space - this will handily inform what kind of seating you might need and how you want to arrange things. I'm always taking mental notes when people are over lol.

You could also have a long sofa against the back wall and two chairs facing it (they wouldn’t be great seats to watch tv but you’d have a longer sofa). In this scenario you could also have a sofa+chaise combo instead of just sofa. Everything would have to be scaled well to not overwhelm the space but I think you should choose the layout that works best for you. Hope my drawing isn’t too messy to understand the three options I think are best

Can you provide a photo showing kitchen and sofa area in same shot. Often color problems can be solved by changing layout so less of the wrong color piece shows. Your builder-grade finishes are actually very harmonious. Put aside the idea of painting them for now and see what you can do with other elements that are less permanent. Yes, the couch is the immediate problem, not the builder-grade finishes and colors. Some suggestions: --Less couch. Remove the chaise section if that's possible. That will open up your space, expose more of your rug, which actually goes very well with ebony cabinets, your art, ottoman, etc. --If chaise section can't be relocated, can you float it to face your very nice view? Then put a patterned throw on the back of it. --Get ebony/brown/gray, and taupe/gray sofa pillows--very high contrast. A morrocan wedding pillow/throw would look great draped on your sofa. They're made of natural fabrics in ivory, taupes, gray.