Top Tips For Arranging Furniture In Your Home

There are some basic layout rules to achieve a polished, pulled-together look in any room. An empty room can be an opportunity to create your own haven, but with so many ways to fill it, how do you know where to start?

We’ve been looking into some of the basic rules of furniture arrangement and picked out some top tips. These tips will help you to figure out where to put things and how to prioritise the choices you make.

Identify the room’s focal point - it might be a fireplace, view or TV - and position the furniture accordingly. If you’re not sure what element to make the focal point in your room Houzz has some great inspiration. For a lot of people the focal point of their room is a TV. Research has shown that there is an ideal distance between your TV and seating. It’s suggested that is three times the size of the screen (measured diagonally). Therefore, if you have a 40-inch TV, your chair should be 120 inches away.

Place the largest pieces of furniture into the room first, such as the sofa in the living room or the bed in the bedroom. In most cases this piece should face the room’s focal point.

Think about the flow of traffic through the room — generally the path between doorways. Don’t block that path with any large pieces of furniture if you can avoid it. It is suggested that you should allow 30 to 48 inches of width for that are more regularly accessed and a minimum of 24 inches of width for minor ones. Try to direct traffic around a seating group, not through the middle of it.

In a dining room, make sure there’s at least 48 inches between each edge of the table and the nearest wall or piece of furniture. If traffic doesn’t pass behind the chairs on one side of the table, 36 inches should suffice. In bedrooms allow at least 24 inches between the side of the bed and a wall, and at least 36 inches between the bed and a swinging door.

Vary the size of furniture pieces throughout the room, so your eyes move up and down as you scan the space. Balance a large or tall item by placing another piece of similar height across the room from it.

Place a table within easy reach of every seat, being sure to combine pieces of similar scale, and every reading chair has an accompanying lamp. Coffee tables should be located 14 to 18 inches from a sofa to provide sufficient legroom.

Before you move or buy any actual furniture, test your design on paper or better still digitally to test various furniture configurations. We found Autodesk Homestyler to be a useful interactive way you can digitally layout rooms in your home.

What are your furniture arranging tips? Show us on social media how our have laid out your room?