I have spent more time than I care to admit, trying to master furniture arrangement, over the years. When we would move to a new home, I would initially set up a room how I thought I wanted it, but over time I would realize something felt off. So I would rearrange until it felt right. Sometimes this process would take a few weeks, and sometimes a few hours. It was always dependent on what my husband or brothers were willing to put up with at the time.

It wasn’t until I started researching furniture layouts, that I realized there is a formula behind proper set up. Now that I know the formula, I set up my furniture quickly, and only one time per house. Unless I get bored of course!

To help you avoid this furniture arrangement dilemma, I am going to break down this formula so that you can achieve balance in your furniture layouts every time. We will work through the following 6 rules of design for furniture placement.

1. Break the room down into four quadrants.
2. Consider the rooms traffic patterns.
3. Look for the rooms focal point.
4. Establish the room axis.
5. Consider all room activities
6. Make sure all four quadrants are equally weighted.

Let’s get started!

Furniture Layout Rule #1

Furniture arrangement starts with breaking the room down into four quadrants.

When looking at any room in your home, the first thing you are going to do is break it down into four equal quadrants. You will do this by drawing an imaginary line down the middle of each wall.

We are going to use these four quadrants to determine whether or not our furniture arrangement is balanced. We determine this based on the weight of furniture in each section. The weight of an item is based mostly on its size and shape. Proximity to other items, color and texture of furniture also play a part in its weight. For now, we will focus only on size and shape.

Lets look at the picture below. Quadrants one and four feel empty compared to quadrants two and three. I have seen many living rooms set up this way.

If instead, we lay the furniture out like the photo below, we see that all four quadrants are more equally balanced.

There are additional items we can add, such as plants, tables, and other decorations, to balance them out even more. We will look at that, in more detail, later on.

 

Furniture Layout Rule #2

Consider the rooms traffic patterns.

The next thing we are going to look at in order to determine furniture arrangement, is the natural traffic patterns of our room. Things to consider include doors, windows, closets, fireplace, heating and cooling units or floor vents and how they impact our space.

Additionally, we need to leave space for walking from one door to another, if the space we are decorating has more than one point of entry. Looking at our living room below, we are going to need to consider the double doors, as well as all three windows.

Although the doors in this example open outwards, we still want to leave 36 inches of open space, around the entryway. For our windows, we want to leave 12 inches of free space.

Additionally, if you have a fireplace, you will want to leave the hearth, the area in front of the fireplace, free from any furniture. And for your heating and cooling units and vents, you will want to leave 18 inches free for air flow.

Furniture Layout Rule #3

Look for the rooms focal point.

Once we have established our balance lines and our traffic patterns, the next thing we need to do is look for our room’s focal point. Oftentimes a room has an obvious focal point. Obvious focal points include a fireplace, a large bay window, or maybe even built in book shelves. These items are naturally the center of attention in a room.

But what if our space doesn’t have an obvious focal point, like the living room example we are using?

Without a natural focal point, we must create one. In our living room example, we are going to make our television our focal point.

Side note: I have seen designers who are totally against using the television as a focal point, but I find that all of my clients have televisions. Design rules need to make sense for practical life too. Sometimes we learn the rules, just so we can break them.

So now that we picked our focal point, and centered it on our balance lines, we are going to look at rule number four.

 

Furniture Layout Rule #4

Establish the room axis.

Stick with me here. You’ve probably never heard of a room axis, so let me explain. We are going to turn our attention from a top-down perspective to what we see at eye level.

If you draw an imaginary line down the center of the television, from floor to ceiling, this is your wall axis.

Look at the television as it currently sits. Our attention is only drawn to about halfway up the wall. Our focal point should draw our attention all the way up to the ceiling.

We can accomplish this multiple ways. My favorite ways are painting an accent wall, using a larger entertainment center, or adding shelves or art.

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Our items don’t have to go all the way up to the ceiling. They just have to have enough height to draw the eye up.

Now lets take this imaginary line across the ceiling, and down the wall across from our focal point. This is our room axis.

Try not to get too hung up on the technical term here. What you need to know is you want to balance the weight of our room, by adding height to the other side of the room, along this imaginary line (room axis).

So here we added a small console table, a mirror to give height, and some accessories. You may be able to add more furniture, depending on how much space you have, . If you have less space, you may have to accomplish this with something simple, like art behind the sofa.

 

Furniture Layout Rule #5

Consider all room activities.

Now that we have balanced our room axis, we will look at what activities take place in our space. For this living room I am going to say that the family watches television, plays games and occasionally eats dinner in this space. So we need to add our seating, some side tables, and a coffee table.

Furniture Layout Rule #6

Make sure all four quadrants are equally weighted.

Now that all of our furniture has been added, we need to make sure our four quadrants are balanced.

What do you think?

Quadrants three and four feel a little empty in the corners. We can add some plants or a large vase, a floor lamp, or even some blanket storage via a basket or blanket ladder. Just don’t overdue it. 

Now our space feels a lot more balanced!

Thanks so much for reading. I hope these six rules help you as you decorate your home, but if you need additional help, I offer online design services, and am happy to help! You can learn a little more about each package here, but feel free to reach out if you have further questions. 

*I know there are a lot of homes with spaces that just don’t make sense, or have fireplaces and windows off centered. I will do a blog post on how to work with some of these issues, soon! I will also look at how these rules apply to bedrooms and dining rooms. Stay tuned!