Update: Asset Refinement and new techniques

Here are a few shots of my current progress. I will detail the changes I made below,. and the reasons I made them.

Assets

The first big change I made to the environment was to resculpt the sofa. The previous sofa model was very undramatic and the fabric seams were not as visible, so I resculpted and baked the entire thing, making it one of the best models in the scene. I found some custom fabric alphas online which helped to sculpt the new sofa.

Here's the sculpt. Since my texture was very low on unique space, I sculpted the cushions and body of the sofa separately.

And here's the Marmoset 2.0 render, vastly better than the previous sofa. I made the wear more subtle and numerous and added more geometry to smooth out the model and sag the cushions a little more. 

Here's some more assets, newly textured, rendered and added to the scene ;

The chinese coffee table has been edited to have a glass top for more visual appeal. Next on the priority list is the beanbags and radiators.

Here's a WIP apartment door. I added latches as the hippies would probably appreciate a harsher lock system to hide their operation.

And here's a second texture pass on the bookcase. I felt it worthy of this now that I understood gloss maps properly.

Carpets

In creating the pile of carpets in the corner of the room in the concept, I was initially concerned about the best way to do it, and my previous attempt to fold the carpet vert-by-vert was laughable. So I speculated on a technique to do it in the same manner as real life!

My new technique was to make some highpoly carpet planes in Max, as well as a notched "well" shape.  I would then texture the carpets front and back. Then, I would drape the carpets one by one over this structure using cloth simulations to make a pile of carpets:

After I had a pile of carpets, I would create a lowpoly shape roughly matching the silhouette of the carpets, and unwrap it. Then, inside Max I baked Diffuse, Normal, AO and Height maps from the highpoly carpets.

Pictured below is the result, and frankly I can't think of anything better, as it came out much better than I expected :)

Well, that was long! As for my next move, continue with texturing and try and push the environment as far as it can go. Thanks for reading :)