Plan Your Room: Understanding Room Layout and Furniture Placement
In this post: Are you often stumped by how to plan your room? Understanding room layout is an important skill to hone to create an ideal furniture plan.⇒
I’m a classicist.
I like to be as appropriate as possible.
I wear florals to garden weddings and long to black tie. I decorate rooms for their function and let the setting drive the style. Libraries can be dark and tweedy, while sunrooms must be light and airy.
It’s not that I don’t like creativity. Quite the contrary. But I prefer the most natural solutions to decorating and find they’re most conducive to pleasant daily living.
This is particularly true when it comes to room layout, where the simplest and most obvious formation is often the best. If you look carefully, the room will tell you where things belong.
I have long avoided contrived room plans, which I find to be forced, at best, and downright ridiculous in the worst cases. Understanding room layout is an important skill and it’s the focus of today’s post. Let’s look at the good, the bad and the ugly.
Room Layout
I think my very first lesson in room layout came during my early teen years.
I went to a new friend’s house for the first time and as we came down the staircase from her room to the first floor, the stairway landing split in two directions. You could go left into the dining room or right into the den, but you had to choose one as there was a wall straight ahead.
My friend chose to go right to enter the den, but I was shocked to see there was a large round ottoman at the foot of the stairs and she literally stepped onto it to climb into the family room.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand why they put the ottoman there. But we’ve all seen decorating infractions that are equally strange. Yes, there are homes that were not designed perfectly for decorating, but there are generally solutions that are reasonably logical.
The overarching goal when it comes to placing furniture in a space is to create a unified whole that serves a purpose, offering comfort and convenience while looking aesthetically pleasing.
If you keep your sights set on harmony and balance, along with a respect for proportion, you’re more than halfway there.
Following are some key principles to keep in mind when planning the layout of the furniture in your rooms.
Define the Function of the Space
Without a doubt, the very first place to start with any room is to determine its purpose or what function it will serve.
A living room is generally built around a conversation area, a dining room around the table where meals will be served. A bedroom is centered around the place where you’ll sleep, while a family room is focused on entertainment for a group. If you dedicate a room to another specific purpose, the furniture will need to accommodate that intent.
Keeping the primary function at the forefront of your mind while setting up your spaces will ensure the room serves you in the best possible way. Resist any temptation to make it harder to use the room to suit your needs. No matter how ugly you think the TV is, if you use it every night, keep it accessible and visible. Likewise, don’t place the dining table in a spot where you need to walk around other furniture, holding a plate of food, to get to it.
Determine the Traffic Flow
A space can only function optimally if you can get to it and through it. The traffic flow of a home is critical, as is the walk space within each room.
The through path should always be the most obvious route, generally starting at the entrance and leading straight through to the next room. Consider where you place things that might get in the way, particularly in entries and hallways, but within the rooms, as well.
Next consider the flow around the room. Can you walk directly to the seating, or do you need to squeeze between tables and clutter? Must you walk around a bed to get to the desk you work at every day? Is there walk space around the entire dining table, or will the people on the other side be uncomfortable and inconvenienced?
Always allow a minimum of 36″ for walk space, 42-48″ is even better for main hallways.
Select a Focal Point
Every room should have a focal point, toward which the furniture is oriented. It might be a fireplace, a television, or a large window with a great view. Where no natural focal point exists, you can create one intentionally with a fabulous piece of art or with shelving and the like.
Once the focal point is selected, everything should be arranged in its direction and for the sake of balance, it’s best not to have other pieces fighting for attention.
But what happens when you have more than one natural focal point? In that case it’s best to choose one as more dominant and downplay the other to maintain harmony in the space.
In our family room, we have a stately fireplace with gilded mirror above, in addition to a large screen TV on an adjacent wall. We used an “L” shaped couch to face both focal points, but placed the TV lower, over an understated console, to allow the mantel to attain prominence.
In the bedroom, the headboard will likely be your focal point and in the dining room a china cabinet or buffet with dramatic decor.
Create a Central Plan or Zones
In most average sized rooms, you’ll want to establish a ‘center’ and bring most of the furniture into that space, which often means pulling the seating and tables away from the walls.
The goal is to have the pieces relate to each other, like a cohesive collection, rather than decorating the perimeter of the room.
Once you have your central cluster (which doesn’t have to be in the literal center of the room), you can then place accents outside the central arrangement and have them relate to an architectural detail instead. A bureau under a window, a desk in an alcove, a table between two columns, etc.
Two notable exceptions: in a very small room, you may have a central composition and still have all the pieces against the walls. And in a very larger room, you may need more than one center, which in effect means creating zones.
In any case, the key point is that your furniture groupings should relate to each other. There should be no one-off chairs or seating. A chair should have, at the very least, a tiny shelf or table nearby.
Know When to Stop
Probably the hardest skill to master is knowing when to stop.
Most rooms look best about a year or two into decorating, when you’ve added all the essential pieces but haven’t started squeezing in that one extra chair or cabinet that has nowhere else to go.
Almost every home could benefit by taking out one or two things from each room, more if you’re including the decorative items in addition to the furniture. Resist the temptation to add little pieces in between the main players.
An overcrowded space is not charming or eclectic. It’s an overcrowded space. And it takes away from the beauty of the pieces that belong.
In the end, furniture placement, like all things, is very personal and your tolerance for what looks done will vary from everyone else’s.
But keep experimenting and always keep in mind balance and proportion, and in time your eye will learn when a room is in harmony and when it simply is not.
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love, love, love your blog! always learning something from your french pov! i have a question, though…your color palette is so soft, but your bedroom is chartreuse!
it works, and i really love it, but i thought it was an odd choice for you 😉
It is not ‘odd’ if you open your eyes and want to stay awake,
she broke the code. Coffee works too if you are not surrounded by such loveliness.
I’ve actually thought about painting it many times, and may one day do it, but the color makes me so happy and the balance in that room is that everything else is white. Btw, the green color was inspired by a pretty little stationery envelope from the place cards for a party I hosted many years ago. I think it’s a lot softer in real life than it reads on a computer.
Thanks for your kind words, btw!
I loved the “know when to stop” part. I have lived in my apartment for just over a year and have This Week, come to that part. I just bought my third armoire and I adore it, but any more furniture will be going onto the bed!!! I’ve been collecting, enjoying, but will be reopening my etsy shop as I make my “turnaround” and start to pare down some of my smaller treasures. I love to decorate constantly and am fortunate to have shelving in my garage so I can rotate on a seasonal basis. I love your blog.
Thank you so much, my friend! And good luck with your new place… 🙂 Sounds like you’re having fun with it!
My living room is 15 x 18. The size is great but the placement of the fireplace makes decorating a challenge! The 9′ long fireplace isn’t centered on the wall. It’s actually set to the far right with the firebox off-centered to the left. When we bought the house 38 years ago, the rustic brick fireplace had a 2-foot deep hearth and only a 7-inch deep mantle. Three years ago, I had the fireplace “faced” with millwork. The flat-faced brick is completely hidden and the surround has a 20″ deep mantle and molding on the “legs.” The new surround/mantle has been centered over the firebox. To make the firebox look centered, we created a “niche” on the right side where the mantel is only 12″ deep. I had marble-look porcelain tile installed over the brick hearth and around the firebox. I love the look and it’s a huge improvement but the door and window placement make it impossible to use the fireplace as the focal point of the room! The key to decorating this room is the proportion of the furniture to the size of the room. It’s taken a long time, but I’m finally happy with the way this room looks and functions! Thank you for your continued inspiration.
Sounds like you came up with a great solution. A fireplace does not have to be the focal point. You can use artwork, a mirror, an armoire or many other things, instead… 🙂
It’s all well and good to try to follow the rules, but what if you have to work with competing existing factors? We can’t run out and buy all new furniture, nor do we want to. I inherited a 150-year-old 8×10 gorgeous Kashan in (predominantly) traditional red and blue, a 150-year-old Chinese table identical to this:
https://www.pamono.eu/chinese-coffee-table-19th-century/?cn=pt&utm_medium=cpc_test&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=PLA_PT_8519981893_86068301669&utm_content=405453926052_c_&utm_term=pla-294682000766___EII-899787&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjoin1qqU8gIV8e3mCh055wanEAQYBSABEgL2nfD_BwE
and other beautiful things like a large Honorable Ancestor. In an open-plan living/dining/kitchen space high in a 3-storey house, every window has stunning views of the Alps. It’s a struggle to know what to highlight from all of that! I do intend to hide the TV, though. Thanks for the pointers.
I think a lot of those beautiful pieces can work together and still fall within the “rules”. But also, the only real rule you need to follow is ensuring that you love your pieces. As long as you’re not keeping everything just because you inherited it, your rooms will be beautiful… 🙂 If the rug is centered in the room with the Chinese table sitting on it, with conversational seating centered in the space around the coffee table, you’ve already satisfied the suggestion to pull the furniture away from the walls and center it in the room. It sounds like your windows could possibly be the focal point, but with an open plan and everything centered, you’re probably ok without an obvious point of focus. Perhaps a piece of artwork over a console table if there is no fireplace, especially if it can be placed between two of the tall windows?