Here is a lobby that I am working on, and I thought I would post early.
Good and clean. Much natural light getting into it? Have you got Detail enhancement or AO turned on in this render too?
Just a simple default gray with a dirt map.
as john says, I’d flood the room with bluish light coming from those windows. if they are in fact windows..
This is a good start! Looking forward your render! 
very nice. You make the figurines or pick them up from a site like turbosquid?
mh
I purchased the plaster above the fireplace, from Turbosquid. When I went looking for the figures, and saw the prices on Turbosquid, I looked elsewhere. I found tons of things, including the figures, on archive3d.net
really like this one, even though I think it may not be descriptive enough to give a proper feeling of the space. very intriguing framing though. I like the lighting too, and I think some cold light coming from the left would create some nice contrast. I’d leave the fixtures on though, even if toned down a bit.
very nice - and some soot on wall behind the flame and a used look down the fire?
I’m having a heck of a time getting my lights balanced, but I think it is coming along nicely. I have blue coming in, on the sides, from the outside. I have the fireplace with a nice orange glow, which is the strongest light source in the scene. The artificial lights were the most difficult , because I wanted it bright enough to light the room, but not to bright that they are blown out. Anyway, I’ll post tomorrow, if all goes well.
when I say that it doesn’t render, I mean the initial buckets just sit there for hours.
Here is the scene $25.00 Paypal for anyone who can help before 5:00pm 
some good stuff in the model, too
Taking a look. What’s it doing Bobby?
I have been tweaking settings for 2 days. Low settings are awful and high settings will take days. The settings now are pretty low, which is what I posted. I did crank up the exterior lights, and I use a 100 watt template for the interior lights. The materials are all pretty basic.
Please note for anyone downloading: This is a max 2013 file.
So back to Irmap for the primary for one thing. On your materials, your high anti aliasing is going to undermine any material sampling, but your material sampling is so low that you’re going to end up going through every level of the 1 to 24 anti aliasing steps. I’d up your dmc sampler threshold to 0.01, set the adaptive amount to 0.9 to let it work adaptively, likely lower your max aa and start upping your material and light samples.