The Art of Placement

Are you getting a little tired of the 15-year-old furniture arrangement in the living room? Perhaps you’d like to give your home a fresh look, but you can’t afford to buy even one new chair, much less bear the cost of a complete redecoration. Or you’ve just moved into a new home and don’t know how to fit all of your furnishings into a smaller space.

Then you’re ready to learn the art of proper furniture placement. By placing your old furnishings in their optimum locations, you will not only rediscover their beauty but also create a more flowing and cohesive-looking home – all for free.

Arrangement Basics

The cornerstone of a pleasingly decorated and functional room is a well-planned, balanced furniture arrangement. Here are a few tips on the art of placement to help you increase your home’s comfort and beauty:

Start with function. Decide how the room will be used, and limit its function to one or two activities. A room with an exercise bicycle, a desk, a bed and a sewing machine is jumbled and confusing to the eye. Walk through your home and assess where you might be able to combine or limit functions, or make your furniture do double-duty.

Draw a plot plan. If you make a scale drawing of the room and its furnishings you can experiment with new furniture placement without hurting your back. This also frees you to try arrangements you might not dare in three dimensions.

As you’re playing with the room’s furniture arrangement on paper, keep the next five points in mind:

1. Create a focal point. On entering a room, your eye searches for a center of interest. Find a focal point to keep the eye from flitting about restlessly, and build your furniture arrangement around it. Typical focal points can include a fireplace, a large window, a colorful piece of artwork, a cleverly arranged bookcase, a piano, the space over a bed or (heaven forbid!) your desk.

2. Group your furnishings. Create inviting conversation areas or functional furniture groupings to break up the space. Furniture looks better when arranged so that the pieces “relate” to each other. A huge room with a lonely couch on one end is not as welcoming as a pair of chairs angled towards each other with a table in between.

3. Blend and match. Avoid mixing too many styles, colors, and sizes of furniture. Some people can create harmony in an eclectic design, but most of us end up with a weird mix of college dorm and Lucy Ricardo’s living room.

• If you want to mix styles, keep one or more design elements constant: the same wood, same color, same scale, or period.

• If you have a real mishmash of styles, move out a piece or two, or look elsewhere in you home for a piece that is more appropriate.

• Keep matching pieces together.

4. Guide traffic. Allow two to three feet for traffic flow. Traffic does not have to flow in a straight line through a room. Use the furniture to control the traffic pattern. For example:

• If traffic flows through the middle or diagonally across a room, place a sofa and sofa table in the natural pathway and funnel the traffic to either or both sides. Conversely, guide traffic through the center of the room by creating two separate seating areas to either side.

• Pull a seating arrangement toward the center of the room so that the traffic flows behind it.

5. Balance the furnishings. Don’t let the visual weight of an impressive focal point or a large piece of furniture throw the room out of balance. For example:

• If you have a wall of dark bookshelves, place an armoire, a large couch with art over it, or another substantial piece of furniture on the opposite wall.

• If you have a piano on one end of the room place a conversation area on the other.

• Don’t cover one wall with art and leave the opposite one barren or sparsely covered.

Have fun. Let your creative juices flow and don’t be afraid to experiment. When you find the right home for Grandma’s rocker your heart will sing. Rearranging your furnishings will let you rediscover the beauty of your possessions and breathe new life into your home.

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