How To Best Arrange Your Living Room Furniture

How To Best Arrange Your Living Room Furniture

People matter most!

Its NOT just about the "look."

Arrangement should center all around ... people. Your people.

How does your family actually use your furniture?

The living room is the heart of the house.

It’s where you communicate together with all your loved ones and those closest to you. It’s where the family settles in for the night and spends quality time together. It’s one of the most important rooms in the house, if not the most important room, so it’s important to have this vital room full of the right furniture ... arranged correctly so anyone who enters immediately feels the welcoming warmth and comfort of your home. 

Let’s take a look at the best ways to keep your living room furniture design layout flowing beautifully.

 

Keys to Placing Furniture

If you’re going to try your hand at designing your living room with your current furniture, there’s a couple of key ways to get started.

Measure twice. Fits nice. :-) 

First, you’ll want to measure your living room so that you can get an idea of the ratios of space you’re dealing with on all sides. Draw it out on paper. Rough sketch is fine. It works. People-flow is vital. They have to get through, right? I mean ... the furniture should accommodate the flow and not block the major pathways, right? So draw in the paths people most commonly use.  

After you’ve measured everything, some people go next-level by drawing out the actually measurements on graph paper and convert feet into inches to make the scaling far easier. Just stick to inches: 160" by 110" is for the sectional area, for example. Easier. If you’d like to spend the time, you can make furniture cut-outs to scale so that you can comfortably move around all the pieces on your drawn-out room to get a bird’s eye view of how everything looks as you go. If that sounds like too much work though, you can always find a 3D room rendering tool online. Plenty of room-render software is available for room-artists  to better create backgrounds in their drawings and paintings. They often come equipped with all sorts of different looking furniture, so it should be easy to find something that’s similar looking to what you have or what pieces you’re thinking about investing in. 

Find The Best Focal Point

One main "Sha-Pow" item should anchor the room. Unlike bedrooms and office spaces, there’s not much of a predetermined focal point in a living room. That's sad. So it’s often up to you to go out and find something of visual interest to draw the eye in the room, or else your couches will end up being the focal point, and often times they’re not very deserving of that as they often lack visual interest and primarily focus on comfort as their main function. Thus, the focal point of a living room is either something you put inside like a chandelier or something that’s already architecturally interesting about the space, like a fireplace. Some people call the anchor-item a "conversation-starter." Something that gets people curious. And talking. "Oh, tell me about this!" Once you’ve got that determined, the whole of your living room will revolve around that focal point. If the focal point of your living room is a TV though, please remember to space your seating area appropriately distanced from the TV and maintain a proper viewing angle. You shouldn’t have your couch any closer than 8 feet away from the TV and the TV should only be around 30 degrees above or potentially below the couch’s level. Once you’ve established the main seating area and focal point, the next order of business is the visual balance of the room.

Visual Balance Around Your Focal Point

In most living rooms, the TV is the focal point (... by default, because most folks can't come up with something more intriguing ... which we hope you can!) and it’s often placed on a wall where the rest of the living room is crowded around this viewing-area. However, a better way to organize your living room would be to flank the TV and create a sense of balance on all sides. Lemme 'splain. That means using armchairs, chaises, and other seating to create a better sense of unity throughout your unified design. If, however, your main goal in your living room is fostering conversation (which my mother was a big fan of conversation-matters-most in her livingroom layout). Then applying a somewhat-circular configuration of seating will make the room’s focal point more centered on human interaction within the room rather than ... non-interaction with a screen. Essentially, whatever point in the room, whether it’s an interesting looking table, large television, or something else as your main focus ... the anchor is what your furniture should surround. Think (parentheses-style) when you place your furniture, as it’s supposed to create a similar, gentle emphasis. 

Managing Storage Solutions

You know ... the clutter-catcher. We all have that one table near the door or the entrance to the living room that looks and acts more like some kind of basket for all the things you don’t want to deal with at the moment. Obviously, this is an eyesore, but it’s also one that’s really hard to get rid of. “We need that table,” you whisper whenever you think of just getting rid of it. That may be true, but starting fresh is the best way to reorder your life and your living room. That catch-all table doesn’t need to be placed where it can continue to act as a magnet for mess. Being deliberate about where you place your storage solutions and surfaces around your living room surely helps you eliminate that urge to just throw the mail, receipts, and whatever else you need near the door on that same table. Reduce eye-sore. "Splan your splace." Sometimes words are so fun! 

 

As you’re strategically swapping storage solution stations, there are a few tried-and-true placements. Clearly, a coffee table belongs in the center of your main seating area, though we’d caution you to leave around 18 inches of space between the coffee table and the seating area. Let's level-up that coffee table into a conversation table! If you’re working with a smaller space, but you still need the proper table spacing, start with some nesting tables. Those tables can be brought front and center when in-use and put on the back burner when no longer in-use without interrupting the flow of your room. Most importantly, be honest. If there really isn’t much space, don’t get huge furniture pieces. You’ll only serve to make the entire area look and feel smaller and there’s nothing very warm and welcoming about feeling cramped. Trending now are "chair side" tables, which are the modern equivalent of old-school TV trays, just updated and more stable, and sorta cute because the base slips underneath the sofa which the top supports your pop ... or soda. 

Light It Up Now! 

It shouldn’t be very surprising that lighting is one of the most important things in any room. Hopefully, your living room comes equipped with loads of natural lighting. But if it doesn’t, there’s still a glimmer of hope (get it? glimmer?). The general consensus between interior designers and lighting experts is that more options is more appealing. Don’t get a single-super bright overhead light just so you don’t have to get other, small light fixtures. Diversify! The more light sources you have that are gently lighting the room, the better your furniture will look and the cozier the room will feel. A great way to accomplish this if you don’t have the floor space for multiple tables that can hold small lamps is with standing lamps. There’s loads of really interesting-looking standing lamps now available that can provide plenty of light in a corner of a room while not being as overpowering as overhead lights tend to be. Then complementing those fixtures with table lamps on the table space you have will make it as easy to read a magazine in your living room as it is to talk with and see other people, all without sacrificing the inviting aura your living room should have. 

Dig For That Just-Right Rug

It's out there! Go on a manifest quest! Lots of folks look at exotic rugs and become enamored with the arty-feel without really considering how well they’ll blend with the whole room. As a word of caution, if you’re investing in an area rug for your living room, make sure the rug is centered and make sure the color scheme doesn’t clash with what you already have. There are such a broad array of rug styles now. If your rug is loud and intense, with more than 4 colors, it might work best in a mostly neutral area. Pay attention to where you’ve stationed your lighting around the room, and then place the rug near the middle point of those light sources and the room’s walls. This will help balance the room while not detracting from the points of interest you’ve already established. 

Shop Your Community Furnishings

Here at Community Furnishings in Hammond, we’re passionate about helping folks discover their picture-perfect pieces of furniture that help make your house into a home. That’s why we feature a variety of comfortable, stylish living room furniture pieces, like impressive, buttery leather sectionals and power-recliners. Our selection is ever-evolving as we feature specifically-curated, mid-to-high-end factories who are known for their excellent workmanship and attention to detail. 

Additionally, we provide value to our community by making all of our furniture pieces actually accessible, which happens through financing options. Our creative, unique financing solutions help almost anyone get the furniture they need for their home sooner, rather than later. Smaller, streamlined, more affordable, incremental payments serve outfit your all your rooms with attractive furniture a very affordable budget. Shop our selection today, and feel free to reach out to our knowledgeable staff if you have any questions. We’re happy to help however we can, whether you’re shopping online or in-person at our furniture store serving the whole region: Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, Munster, Griffith, Merrillville, Highland, Gary, Schererville, Dyer, St. John, Cal City, Lansing, South Holland, Hobart, Hessville, Hegwisch, plus the greater Chicagoland area. Thanks for reading! 

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