Interior Room Furniture Placement

Decorating your interior room needs to be accomplished one step at time. We will focus here on basic furniture placement in your living room. The first thing you need to do in starting your interior room decorating is stand at the entrance to your living room. Here you need to visually take notice of several things: --Traffic Flow Pattern --Dominant Wall or Walls --Visual Assets --Use

This is the foundation on which all decorating decisions will be made towards proper living room furniture placement. 1.Your Traffic flow is the path taken from your point of reference to each individual exit of your room. This path should never walk through a furniture arrangement nor be obstructed by furniture.

2.Dominant walls should be obvious not only in size, but position status. Size will be your longest unbroken wall, and position dominance will be the wall seen most of the time by the majority of the room, or the wall facing a visual asset (such as pool, landscaping, scenic view, etc.)

3.Visual assets may or may not exist in a room--keep in mind we are currently observing structure only-not your favorite piece of art (that comes later). Windows with great views, exits to porch, pool, landscaping are all areas that can be visually appealing and the wall opposite that can be a secondary dominant wall.

4.Use is your own personal answer of what you want the usefulness of your room to be. Will the room center around media entertainment, T.V., gathering room with kitchen combo and/or dining combo, this will later aid in the personal decisions of your furniture placement.

Wall Flow and Traffic Flow both involve visual assets

Once you have a feel for your interior room decorating such as your traffic flow, dominant wall/walls, visual assets, and use you are ready for your ideal furniture placement for your living room. This is the foundation for all your decorating implementations.

In our example we have two dominant walls. Our largest faces the entrance to the room and our other faces our visual asset--sliding doors to a brick paved pool area. Our use for the interior room is a family living area with media and gathering focus involving nook area, kitchen area, and living area. Our traffic pattern from the room entrance separates the kitchen and nook area then splits right and left to pool area and separate bedrooms. We will not interrupt this traffic flow in our furniture placement.

--large pieces-wall units, bookshelves, sofas, etc. --secondary complementary furniture-chairs, loveseats, chaise, etc. --small unifying pieces-end tables, coffee tables, ottomans, etc.
Nothing decorative-yet, we will save the best for last!

Decorating ideas for tables

In our example we have two major pieces of furniture to address, a sofa and a media housing wall unit. If we place the wall unit on the secondary dominant wall (facing our visual asset) the television will not be viewable from the kitchen or nook area. Since the use of our room is a gathering media room the TV wall unit should be seen from all angles.

So we place the wall unit on dominant wall one. Now the sofa placement. The sofa has two options--dominant two facing your visual asset or freestanding facing the media center.

Option one with the sofa on the secondary wall you create another traffic flow encouraging entrance into the media viewing and conversation area. This unites the room as one entity.

Option two places the sofa freestanding facing the wall unit. This creates a barrier from the rest of the room, forming a distinct area separate from the kitchen and nook.

Interior Room and Traffic Flow

Now you have anchored your dominant walls and created two focal points for your interior living room. This is the basic starting point for the rest of your decorating now we get to play with the secondary and unifying furniture placements.

More on furniture placement