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Decorating Information and Home Tips for Furniture PlacementFurniture placement involves several stages. During the "Interior-Room" decorating page we decided on focal points of your room--identifying dominant walls and visual assets as your focal points. We also discussed primary use for the room as a means of designating anchoring pieces of furniture as a starting point. The continuation of good furniture placement will present your home as warm and inviting inspiring guests and family to feel more relaxed. By now you should have an inventory of your remaining pieces. We will use these basic pieces to form a grouping oriented around our dominant anchoring furniture pieces and our focal points. We already have a media unit on one of our dominant walls and a large sofa anchoring either our large wall or directly opposite our media unit. To help with your furniture placement a rough drawing of your room may help, graph paper and furniture cut outs to scale are accessible on-line, also many craft and hobby stores have these for sale even in magnets. This is a fun place to start and won't cause injury to your back.
Traffic flow and the interior room
Once you have a visual for your living room decorating, its time to start moving. With your pieces in place, sit back and analyze. Enter the room, look around, try to get a feel for the flow of your room--does it encourage you to walk, is there easy access to the sitting area, does it feel balanced? Sit in each chair does it encourage easy conversation, does it accomodate the function of the room, are you comfortable? If your answer is yes you have succeeded in your furniture placement challenge.
We have used two adjacent chairs facing the media/wall unit within close proximity to the sofa which anchors our dominant wall. A typical home tip for decorating conversation areas is to keep your seating within 8 feet of each other to allow for comfortable talking. There also should be table access from all seating for drinks and fun trinkets (to be addressed later). More decorating information stipulates the distance between the coffee table and seating should be approximately 14-18 inches. A popular trend for decorating living rooms is to use ottomans for coffee tables--it softens the room and creates great visual interest. Our other example has a freestanding sofa directly across the media unit. This offers direct separation of the multi purposes of the room. In this example we placed a love seat on the dominant wall. If we used the two chairs, as in the previous example, the room would not be balanced, that large wall needed a heavier piece than the two chairs to anchor and balance the room. The love seat and sofa can change places easily without throwing the balance of the room. Correct furniture placement relies on a lot of balance and scale.
More on decorating with tables
In both examples the room would not be balanced if the other wall was not addressed. We do not want to block the view to our visual asset so it is puposely left open but in order to balance the room we need something to weight that side of the room. We utilized an isolated corner to create a private haven. An escape corner for reading, relaxing, and/or just being. The example with the chairs used a chair and ottoman combination to create our escape corner and balance the room. Chairs are lighter and inviting letting people utilize personal space and still engage with others. All three of these chair locations in your living room could accomodate a recliner--for those who can't live without them. The example with the love seat and sofa needed an item with more substance to balance out the other meaty pieces in the room. A chaise is the perfect solution for this room and a private haven that invites a true sigh of relief. There is a decorating trend leaning away from the use of the large sofa and using a love seat as the heavy dominant piece in a room. This is very useful for decorating small spaces and lends itself favorably for creating a cozy environment. Two coordinating love seats is amazingly appealing. More tips for small space living
If you have tested the feel and flow of the room and are satisfied with the results. Your final consideration for tying it all together is a rug. A rug defines your space and pulls it all together. Do not be afraid to throw a rug on top of your carpeting. The size of the rug should include the front legs of each piece of furniture to sit right on the rug or frame the rug by minimal space of 3-6 inches.
We focus alot on how your decorated room feels to you, because this is your space--an extention of you it needs to feel right so keep experimenting til it feels right
Furniture Placement and balance
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