Easy Steps to Furniture Arrangements 1

It seems like so many of us at one time or another stress-out when it comes to placing the furniture in our rooms. However, there isn’t any reason to make this task so difficult, when there are some easy steps you can follow which will make the job go quickly and with a minimum of physical exertion.

Function

The three aspects of function are:

• Convenience
• Flow of traffic
• Ease in conversation

Convenience

To begin you should consider the convenience the furniture arrangement will provide. Do you need a seating arrangement in the living room close to the dining room entrance? Perhaps you need storage units included in the seating group, for storage of books, magazines or knitting needles (my aunt would need this as knitting is a past time she still enjoys).

Some individuals like a large cocktail table placed in front of the sofa, so lots of movie or TV snacks can be placed upon it: Especially during Super Bowl Sunday and the World Series.

Flow of Traffic

When considering the flow of traffic, it is easily determined, if you walk naturally through the room. It should be easy to walk through the room without having to skirt-around a chair or table to keep from walking into it. Generally it is best to avoid placing a conversational grouping in line of a traffic pattern.

But I have had enough experience to know, that some rooms just do not allow for furniture to be placed any way but one way, and that means people will walk right through the conversational grouping to get from one door of the room to another door of the room, or another activity area in the room.

Conversation

There is just something about sofas that make conversation difficult. I like sofas for watching movies, and TV. I don’t like them for conversation because you can’t see the face of the person seated next to you on the sofa, without turning to face them, and if there are others seated on chairs, it means turning your shoulder or back to them.

However as we all have sofas in our conversational groupings, we make the best of these when family or company arrives to gather around for conversation.

If your room is large, it is often wise to have a grouping that is strictly for conversation. This grouping can have as many sofas and chairs as the size of the room will accommodate. Incidentally, sofas which face each other provide for better conversation than those placed at right angles.

All furniture in a conversation grouping should be placed close enough for everyone to hear even a person with a soft or low voice when they speak. I have been in homes where the conversational grouping consisted of a sofa at one end of the room and a couple chairs at the opposite end: With a space of about ten feet to try to project your voice across.

There is a quality a conversational grouping must provide and that is of intimacy, or closeness. This is another reason why, the furniture pieces placed in a conversational grouping must be close enough for all to hear anyone who is speaking.

Aesthetic Considerations

Do you remember the ten concepts of basic decoration? (See article: http://www.gomestic.com/Home-Improvement/Using-the-10-Basic-Concepts-of-Decorating.395671 ) Once again we call upon these concepts to guide us in arranging our furniture.

Scale and Proportion

Scale and proportion must be considered when arranging furniture. Your room will seem cramped if you use large furniture pieces in a small room. Likewise, lightly scaled furniture in a massive room will appear “lost” and insignificant.

Another consideration relative to scale and proportion is the actual arrangement of your furniture. Do you have large pieces nestled up against smaller ones? If it isn’t possible for you to use furniture pieces that are about the same scale and proportion, then you will have to add some weight to the smaller scaled pieces, by the use of darker or brighter colors, patterns, and/or textures. Remember these are ways to add weight to a furniture piece. For larger piece, if the color can be the same as the floor or wall color, the piece will seem less heavy. If the furniture piece is a heavy sofa, use a smooth texture fabric on it.

Balance

In one of the first decorating classes I taught I was fortunate to have as a guest speaker a dynamic man who had a marvelous flair for the profession. Tony was charismatic (the ladies in my class were totally charmed). He shared a story with us about some clients he had worked with for a number of years. When they were re-decorating their summer guest house they gave Tony full say in the decoration of it. However, he didn’t have full say: Several months after he had completed the job, he stopped by for a visit. To his dismay the client had moved all the furniture to one end of the room. This threw the room off-balance. He just smiled and quietly told them, “don’t tell a soul, I was your designer.”

In furniture arranging, balance is crucial. Large heavy pieces must balance with another heavy piece or a grouping of pieces appearing less heavy.

An example: the conversational grouping in my living room consists of a heavy recliner sofa, two recliners and appropriate end tables flanking the ends of the sofa and between the two recliners. These sit in front of a large arched window. Across from this grouping is the TV on a credenza and the spinet piano. Above the TV and piano is a plant shelf (built-in) which adds weight to this wall.

Unity

Recall unity is achieved when everything in the room looks like it belongs together.

There are some ways to achieve this, quite simply:

• Place a conversational grouping to face a focal point (fireplace, window with a view, entertainment unit, antique furniture piece or a picture gallery).
• Gone are the days when every furniture item was the same style and wood tone. Today you can mix styles, and if careful wood tones. For example, Queen Anne, French provincial, American Colonial, and Chippendale styles would all work well together. And woods like cheery, walnut, and fruitwood are possible wood tones for these styles and would coordinate well together.

Rhythm

Remember what was said about line and form giving the room definite impressions? How you arrange your furniture must consider lines and forms. If you want to project an unyielding feeling, use furniture with a lot of straight lines, in square and rectangular shapes. However to break from this rigidness, add a couple oval or round tables. And use these lines and forms throughout your room.

The colors of your furniture also play a big part in the rhythm of your room. And if your furniture has color (gosh, I hope so), then you need to spread these colors around the room. Let’s say your sofa is a print, having blues, greens and rust tones. You establish color rhythm by pulling one of the colors; let’s say the blue, for the upholstery on your arm chairs. And the rust tone for the chair seat of the desk chair that will be also in this room.

I know I have not discussed motifs at any great length. But for our purpose now, just recall it is a design decoration often associated with a particular design era or eras as often been the case.

Your sofa is upholstered with a rose pattern fabric. You can use this motif as a form of rhythm by using it in other furniture piece, such as side chairs which may have a carved rosette medallion as part of the chair back’s design. Maybe the sofa legs are melon shaped; other furniture piece can also have this melon motif as legs, or design motifs on the face piece of the arms or as finials on chair backs.

Considering Your Room’s Dimensions

Your room’s dimensions simply refer to its shape. The usual shapes of a room are rectangular. But also there are square shaped rooms; L-shaped rooms; round rooms, and strangely shaped like my living room, with one wall angling about twenty degrees out from where it connects to adjoining wall.

Of the rectangular, there are many rooms which are considered tunnel rooms. These are long and narrow. A typical measure for such a room might be, twelve feet by eighteen feet. These are tricky to place furniture in, and often one way to help shorten the room visually is placing a screen or smaller furniture piece across the corner of the room (diagonally).

Square rooms generally do not allow for away-from-the-wall furniture arrangements; or separate groupings of furniture within the room. Generally most square rooms are rather modest in size and thus require that furniture be placed against the wall

Circular rooms, such as with the geodesic dome homes, present a challenge for furniture placement. Due to the strong curved lines defining the architectural lines of this type of home, furniture selection will have to carry these curved lines as the predominate line. And there is only one way to place the furniture – into the center of the room, allowing a traffic pattern to flow around the perimeter of the room.

L-Shapes, allow for two separate furniture groupings. During the 1970’s and 80’s there were a lot of new homes in California being built with and L-shaped living/dining room combination. But other combos are also possible: Kitchen/dining, Master bedroom/bath and laundry/child’s play room.

This article discussed the basic considerations required for arranging furniture in your room: Part 2 continues immediately with Rules for Placement, types of placement, and facts and fallacies of furniture arrangement.