Your living room is the heart of your home, the place where the family goes to relax and wind down in the evenings and where friends and guests socialise over a glass of wine and a good chat. This means that in any home, you want to ensure your living room is as comfortable and inviting as it can be, making it a welcoming and relaxing place to be, for you and your loved ones.
However, picking the perfect layout for your room can be easier said than done. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, with living rooms coming in all shapes and sizes, from short and wide to long and narrow and everything between. If you’ve recently moved home and fallen in love with a property, it may be that you didn’t realise the challenges of creating your own room design that are presented by the shape of the rooms.
The sofa should be the heart and soul of any living room, influencing the entirety of the décor of the room and integrating into it perfectly. From buying a sofa to choosing a colour scheme to complement the shape of your room and make it look spacious and cosy all at once, design choices have to reflect not just what you love, but also what works for your home.
Wide/large rooms
Styling a wide living room can be just as difficult as dealing with a space that’s on the small side. The sheer volume of space you have to fill can be daunting. Stand back and take in all the room that you’ve got to play with – it’s a great opportunity to see it as a blank canvas to express yourself. Imagine all the ways you can use your huge space to bring a burst of your personality into the room, a fantastic way to make your house feel like home.
Just because the room is particularly spacious, doesn’t necessarily mean you can go big and oversized with your sofa choice. A really important thing to consider is the ceiling height of the room – if they sit fairly low you might want to keep your furnishings similarly low-backed so that you can create the impression of extra height.
A large room gives you a great opportunity to bring in a corner sofa, allowing it to embrace the style without seeming overcrowded. If you have a big family, a large corner sofa such as the Majestic, soft and super comfortable, means plenty of space to spread out and relax, as well as making the most of the available room you have. A smaller sofa in a large room may just look a little lost.
With a particularly big living room, a good trick to stop it looking cavernous, and make things feel a little more cosy, is to avoid lining your furniture up against the walls. Along with looking a little awkward, you can end up with a lot of empty space in the middle of the room that can make social situations feel less intimate – you don’t always want to feel like you’re sitting on opposite ends of the room. Pull everything a bit closer to the centre of the room to keep it feeling warm and cosy, while also breaking up the space you do have to play with.
Long rooms
Long, narrow living rooms are easy to overwhelm, with clutter and the wrong choice of furniture combining to make the entire room feel crowded. However, with some handy layout tweaks, you can learn to shape the perfect long living room.
The best way to deal with a long space is to divide everything up with a strong layout. Opt for a traditional TV area with a smaller two seater – such as the Layla – which will fit the dimensions you have without looking too compact. Add a small, complementary coffee table and chairs that can slot in the corner areas, complete with surrounding wall to wall bookshelves. You can then zone each of these areas using rugs, lights and colour.
A circular coffee table or footstool in the centre of your seating area is a clever way to stop a narrow space looking too much like an alley, adding much needed curves to soften the angular look.
L-shaped rooms
You usually find that L-shaped rooms are used as a combined living and dining room space. Where the two sections are fairly equally sized, it won’t matter as much which section of the ‘L’ you choose as the living and which as the dining area.
However, generally speaking, one side of the ‘L’ will be longer and more narrow – and this is best used for your dining table and chairs. This works really well for those who love to host dinner parties, because you have the space to fit a longer table, perfect for a bigger gathering. In the wider, shorter section of the room, you can create a cosy, intimate seating area around the TV, to gravitate towards later in the evening. Use a space saving sofa like the Fellini to create a border separating the two elements of your room without cramping it too much.
Open plan rooms
Open plan living is the trend that keeps on trending, with many people preferring to make the most of the space available in their homes, letting natural light flood in and breaking down the barriers between rooms. Whether you’re combining kitchens, dining areas or living rooms, visualise how you want it to look to help with sectioning the space effectively.
When it comes to sofa choices in open plan spaces, you want to use more angular furniture to easily segment the open plan area. For the living room, try to group sofas together around a coffee table as a focal point. The Mami, bold in design and incredibly comfortable, works particularly well for this task. Combine it with an armchair or two to perfect that square look. This centres the room and allows for lots of surrounding space, whilst also separating the sections well.
Regardless of the shape of your living room, there’s a sofa to suit your space with Sofology.
