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Arranging Furniture In My Living Room

"Living room furniture arrangements - nightmare!"



The Question

I have a narrow living room with opposite doorways.

I have looked at so many different ways to arrange my furniture that my head is starting to spin!

What is the best way of arranging furniture (which includes a sofa and loveseat) in a long living room with opposite doorways?

There is an entrance to the living room from a foyer.

Opposite the foyer doorway (on the other side of the living room) a doorway leads into the dining room.

These doorways are located on each end of the long length of the room.

I am not sure whether it is acceptable to place the loveseat across the doorway in this "through traffic" pattern while allowing space to move around it into the dining room.

The longer wall would be the focal point with the full sofa and a piece of artwork.

There is a picture window opposite that focal wall in which I thought of placing a narrow sofa table of some sort.

The Answer

Are you saying that the room is a rectangular shape with doors in each of the two short sides?

Arranging furniture can be a tricky business and I think that the position of the furniture will depend to a large extent on where in the wall exactly the doors are as you need to ensure that none of the furniture seems like an obstacle as you move through the room from one doorway to the other.

If the doorways are central to the wall, you could position your furniture round the edge of the room allowing easy movement across the centre of the room.

If your doorways are both nearer a corner (the same corner), you could place your sofa a couple of feet away from the wall so that the back of the sofa forms a kind of passageway.

If your doorways are in opposite corners and people would have to walk diagonally across the room then, again, you would need to position the furniture against the wall so the centre of the room is clear.

I hope what I have said is clear - it is hard to answer this without being able to draw a diagram.

I suppose if you could hold a piece of string from the centre point of one doorway to the centre point of the other doorway, you wouldn't want anything to get in the way of that as that is the most direct route that anyone would want to take.

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