Your sister should post. Much more could be accomplished. The interior has disparate elements. What is she bringing into the scheme, rugs, art, for instance. As for she likes neutrals, well, there are cool neutrals, warm neutrals, almost neutrals. What about the color of the walls? How about if she starts with almost neutrals? Brown sofa will connect the floor and beams; accents in various tones of creams, light browns, and a third tone in the mix.

Neutrals, no grey and no tv is not enough information if she is looking for layout and design suggestions. Sounds like budget is not an issue and with starting from scratch, maybe hiring someone would be a good option.

If just providing her with ”ideas” the first step is to define needs (seating especially). Then create a floor plan with her, taking into account structural considerations and flow.

Now start fine tuning (color, design, etc) and looking on line for inspiration rooms is suggested to help narrow down, ie: I searched large great room with sliding doors.

Some kind of

or

I do recommend that your sister join Houzz and speak directly to her taste and interests. I applaud you for wanting to help, but it can quickly become like the old game of Telephone, amplifying misunderstandings. Does your sister have a lookbook? If not, Houzz's Ideabook feature is a good way to start collecting inspiration photos.

Thanks for all the responses so far. I know there's not a lot of her inspo in this post, but just wanting to see what others would come up with for ideas. Here are a few things she shared with me so far.

You would start with a plan that is to scale so you can find furniture that meets the scale and layout criteria. Also, a rug would be selected first as all finishes would need to coordinate with it.

Also, precisely locating the floor outlet so that either a table or sofa goes over it is key. Being able to plug in lamps on a sofa table is great.

I would do 2 sofas in an L and two chairs. Place the chairs "in front" of the sliders so you aren't blocking all the view with a sofa at that location.

I"m going to complain about something your sister can't do anything about, but someone reading here who is going to build a house should pay attention to. Pet peeve of mine is building a house with tall ceilings and then using standard height sliders/windows. This space should have had 10 ft high sliders with the 12 ft ceilings and not just the standard 8 ft high sliders.

In a newly built space and one that appears rather large , I think it would be better to hire an interior decorator rather than ”crowd sourcing ” on the internet.

A benefit to doing a scale floorplan is then you can cut out scale examples of furniture to configure placements.

Then get your sister to start this dilemma you know trying to do this second hand is not ever good. I like the chair pic she sent and not the sectional which BTW I always hate. This is totally empty space with no idea of the size or your sisters ideas so no way would I ever suggest much at all without some idea of even her syle. A to scale floor plan is amust no ,matter what. She has money IMO let here spend it on a good ID not a bunch of strangers who know nothing about her and all we do is what celery always does go online and post pics with no regard for any missing info

This has a lot of potential. If you don't mind sharing, how tall are those ceilings?

zealart I believe they are 12ft.

show her all of the pictures suggested here and see which one shes drawn to. Then go from there

There is so much help available on line, if not hiring an ID. The more time she spends upfront researching/saving, the easier decisions will be.