Measuring for Perfect Living Room Furniture Placement: Rules to Live By
One thing that we know to be true is that emotions can cloud your judgment. You spend hours looking for the perfect sofa on a Saturday morning, going from store to store. You finally find the perfect one and you go through the motions with the sales associate in the showroom and place your order. Four weeks later, it arrives — and it doesn’t fit! Maybe it literally will not fit through your door, or maybe it’s just too bulky and oversized for your space. The disappointment, shame, and frustration kick in - how could this have happened? We’ve all been there. It’s a mistake you make only once, hopefully. Thankfully there are rules in place in the interior design world guiding how to select and place the right furniture for your space and that’s what we’re talking about on the Julia Rose Interiors blog today.
The Rules of Space Planning
Space Planning refers to the process of evaluating and designing a room with functionality, efficiency, and aesthetics in mind. It’s the science of placing the right thing in the right place for the right reasons. It means taking a look at your space from a bird’s eye view, and ensuring your layout of all of the items in your space makes sense for how you live in and use the space for all its use cases. Furniture placement and traffic flow are two major parts of space planning - and that’s what we’re focusing on in this article.
Why It Matters
Space planning is one of the first things we do in any interior design project. Some rules in interior design are meant to be broken, but the rules of space planning are not those. These rules are fundamental to achieving a beautiful and functional space and should be emphasized and followed wherever possible. Beyond helping you create a functional, flow-friendly space, space planning also ensures that your home is balanced.
Living Room Rules
Art Above Your Sofa
When planning for art above your sofa, it’s always better to pick the size and layout of your art before you select the actual art itself. This is because there are (you guessed it) rules for the right size and position for the artwork. It’s best to center your art horizontally over the sofa. Measure your sofa and find its midpoint - that’s where the center of your artwork should be. When it comes to hanging it at the right height, you’ll want the artwork to be centered at eye level - this is typically 57” from the floor to the center of the artwork. Consider the scale of the artwork. If you have a thin, narrow, or short sofa, an oversized piece of artwork is going to further shrink the appearance of your sofa. You’ll want to find something that’s more cohesive with the scale of your sofa.
The Space Between Your Coffee Table and Sofa
18” is the ideal distance from the sofa edge to your coffee table. This allows enough space for people to move around the coffee table, but not so much space that you can’t reach the table comfortably to place your cocktail, coffee, or book without straining.
Height Differences
Coffee tables and sofas come in all different heights. Ideally, your coffee table should be slightly lower than your sofa, but not more than 4” lower. Anything lower than 4” and you’re bending down too far to place things on your coffee table.
When it comes to side tables, aim for a side table that’s the same height as the arm of your sofa or chair.
Distance Between Your Seating
Allow for 42” between side chairs positioned next to each other and 3.5’ -10’ between different types of seating. This rule exists to aid in conversation flow.
Distance from Your TV to Your Sofa
The recommended viewing distance for watching television actually depends on how big your television is. The larger the TV, the further away from it you should sit. Ideally, you should figure out what size TV you need before you purchase it. For the minimum screen size, divide your viewing distance by 3. To determine the maximum screen size (for all you sports and movie fans who love big screens) divide your viewing distance by 1.5.
There’s a science to all of this — and that is what makes interior design both a practice in artistry and a technical skill.
It can be overwhelming to accurately space plan on your own, but we’re here to help you. Reach out to info@juliaroseinteriors.com to schedule your in-person consultation today and we’ll help you figure out your perfect layout.
