A Practical Guide to Home Furniture Arrangement

Your home functions as a place to raise your family, connect with the people you love and make lifelong memories. You invest thousands of dollars into a mortgage every year and purchase real, high-quality furniture to make the home beautiful. This level of financial, emotional and mental investment requires intense dedication.

And yet, despite all your investment and dedication, you find it challenging to make your home perfect. Sometimes, it feels like things don’t flow correctly, look right or work together. Every homeowner faces that moment when you want to spend the entire weekend completely rearranging the house.

Next time that happens, use this guide. We’ve compiled dozens of practical tips for arranging two of the most important rooms in your home: the living room and the bedroom. You will learn things like:

• How to create an amazing traffic flow in busy rooms
• The one thing you need in abundance in the living room
• Ways to ideally position the focal point of a bedroom
• How elimination actually gives you more in your bedroom

Want to create beautiful rooms that provide practical, comfortable and functional space? Keep reading and learn how to arrange furniture in the best ways possible.

The Living Room: Where Families Live, Laugh and Love

A proper living room brings people together. It’s the place you invite your family, closest friends, acquaintances and even strangers. You’ll encounter some of life’s most precious moments and hear some of the most tragic news here. But most importantly, your living room will be a place of living, laughter and love.

This room serves as a place for family and friends to come together and enjoy each other’s company. Whether formal or informal, your living room serves multiple functions depending on the occasion.

Because of this, the best arrangements feature flexible options for the family. It should establish a connection and relationship between each furniture piece in the room and easily transform into several functions based on your family’s needs.

As most people realize while attempting to arrange furniture, it’s a daunting task full of endless opportunities. The myriad of arrangement options leaves even the most skilled arranger uncertain about the best layout.

But have no fear: the following tips for how to arrange a living room will guide you through this journey. You’ll soon find the perfect arrangement pattern for the wonderful space in your home.

Consider Popular Traffic Patterns

 

In today’s society, many modern homes feature electronics like televisions as the focal point of a large living room. Other, more traditional, spaces make human interaction the primary focus. But regardless of your purpose, you should always account for the popular traffic patterns in the room.

If you spend time watching television, create a traffic pattern that doesn’t impede the viewers. Keep the following in mind for living rooms with a television as its focal point:

• Arrange furniture for viewers to easily see the television.
• Consider people that will need to enter and exit the room.
• Establish simple ways to quietly join the family or leave the room without disrupting everyone’s viewing experience.

If you want to enjoy a more formal living room experience, arrange traffic patterns with both the host and guest in mind. When arranging your traffic patterns, remember to:

• Make it easy to mingle with one another without disrupting conversation.
• Create space to comfortably enter and exit seating areas.
• Allow areas for standing, walking and moving room to room.

Considering traffic patterns will leave your guests comfortable and happy during your gatherings. It will also keep peace in the home, because you won’t find the family fighting about missing a part during the movie due to a poor traffic flow issue.

Account for Good Conversation

Even the most technologically advanced family will have times of conversation, games and interaction with one another. Believe it or not, the way you arrange your living room furniture can stifle or strengthen communication.

 

Line your furniture parallel to the room’s walls for greater cohesion. It will make the room feel unified and calm, whereas a diagonal arrangement elicits contrast and excitement.

Once you have the right feel in the room, work to create a comfortable seating arrangement. The right arrangement will keep conversations sparked by visually engaging occupants with one another. For a powerful conversation-focused arrangement, you’ll need a love seat or sofa and two upholstered chairs. Face the chairs parallel to the couch and place a large, shared coffee table between the two.

Good conversation adds a priceless touch to any gathering with family or friends. For many people, it’s too easy to sit in the same room without ever knowing the other person. It takes something special to create an environment where people want to live, laugh and love.

When you account for good conversation in your home arrangement plans, you create endless possibilities for connection, love and growth in your home. Life doesn’t revolve around the technology we create, but around the people we invite into our homes.

Place Table Tops Within Arm’s Reach

Living rooms need plenty of tabletop space throughout the area. Your family and guests will appreciate space to place drinks, books, reading glasses and saucers. A few good places to put solid wood tables include:

• Between two comfortable, upholstered chairs
• Behind the sofa or love seat
• On either side of the sofa or love seat
• Along an unused wall area
• Near any other seating areas in the room

You can’t have enough space for placing refreshments during a party or quiet reading hour. Just make sure to equip each table top with coasters to protect the wood!

Divide and Conquer Large Spaces

Homes come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes a home may feature an open floor plan, or it may have a large space for the living room. Unify large spaces together by creating several small areas within the room that work together.

Try dividing up a large living room by:

• Creating two or three different seating areas. One area could include the sofa with two parallel upholstered chairs. Then, make another seating area with two comfortable, upholstered chairs and a side table between them.
• Dividing areas of the room using different sized area rugs and folding screens.
• Adding a table with seating options to use for games and activities. If you don’t have a formal dining space, this portion of the living room could function as a place to eat meals together as well.

Large spaces mean more furniture to arrange, and these spaces also create even more opportunities for awkward arrangement. To avoid poor furniture arrangement, follow these tips:

• Unify the large space through repeated patterns and colors across the various sections of the room.
• Get creative with seating and tabletop options. If the space feels too large for just one coffee table, add smaller tables and ottomans around the room. You want to make it easy to join the various sections as needed.
• Use a combination of floor, table and wall lamps to avoid dark shadows in the room. Make sure you don’t go overboard with this step, though. Too many lamps will make the space feel crowded and awkward.

Large spaces may seem overwhelming, but a bit of smart planning will give you a well-arranged, functional space. Ultimately, the best ways to arrange living room furniture depends on your personal preference, needs and uses. But if you apply these practical tips, your living room will function well and look visually appealing to all your guests.

Bedroom: An Oasis From the World

You’ll spend one-third of your life in a bedroom, and that only accounts for the time you spend sleeping. This area of your home should feel comfortable, clean and cozy. These attributes help provide you with a restful night’s sleep and a relaxing atmosphere.

When a master suite includes a master bath, you’ll spend an even larger portion of your day in the bedroom. It not only functions as a place of rest, but as a place to revitalize and get ready for the day ahead.

Some people choose to add other functionality to their bedroom, such as morning exercise, study areas, reading nooks and vanity areas. With all the possibilities and functions of a bedroom, it can feel overwhelming when it comes time to arrange the room.

However, regardless of the additional functions, a bedroom functions simply. By following a few guidelines, you can equip yourself with more than enough knowledge on how to arrange your bedroom.

Choose a Location for the Bed

It’s no surprise that the bed works as the focal point of a bedroom. After all, without the bed, it would just be another room in your home. Where you place the bed sets the tone for the entire bedroom. There are a couple of different placement suggestions for the bed. You can couple or separate the suggestions as necessary:

• Place the bed against the largest wall. Visually, this reinforces its prominence as the most important aspect of the bedroom. However, the layout of doors and windows in the room may hinder use of this tip. It’s more important to align the bed functionally than to put it against the largest wall.
• Place the bed opposite of the door. This serves to reinforce your bed’s importance. It also serves as a welcomed sign of relaxation when you first walk into the room. Nothing feels quite as good as the sight of your comfortable bed after a long, tiring day.
• Put the bed in the furthest corner of the room. Place your bed in the far corner to elicit a romantic and dramatic atmosphere. This works especially well in large rooms that feature additional functions.

Balance Large Furniture Pieces

Arrange any substantial piece of furniture opposite of the bed. This will help balance the room. Placing two large pieces too close to each other will make the entire room feel awkward and cluttered.

Examples of large furniture pieces include:

• Long, solid wood dressers
• Vanity tables with a mirror
• Large televisions
• Chaise lounges

If you have more than one large piece, keep a balanced mindset when arranging the room. For example, if you have a bed, dresser and chaise lounge, try to arrange them in a triangle formation.

What if you don’t have a lot of large furniture pieces aside from your bed? This can make the room feel unbalanced as well. In cases like this, find furniture you can use to balance the room. Something as simple as a small table and large piece of artwork can create balance – this works especially well for smaller spaces.

Learning how to arrange bedroom furniture is a big task. But the simple act of balancing the pieces goes a long way when it comes to proper bedroom arrangement.

Eliminate Clutter

 

An excess amount of things can make a room feel chaotic. You should avoid this type of atmosphere, especially in your bedroom. Find creative ways to eliminate clutter in the space, and when it comes to storage, there are several things you can do for your bedroom:

• Maximize Under the Bed Storage: You can use a platform bed with drawers for storing all sorts of items. If your bed frame lifts your bed off the floor, you can purchase storage compartments that easily slide under the bed. This amount of storage space gives you space to store things you don’t use often, such as out-of-season clothing and seasonal decor.
• Organize Your Dresser: A beautiful, solid wood dresser will make a room look beautiful. But there’s more than meets the eye to a good dresser. If you use the space well, you can store all sorts of things in your dresser. Even if you fill it entirely with clothes, using an effective organizational system will help you keep your room nice and tidy.
• Take Advantage of Closet Space: Do you take full advantage of your closet’s storage space? Install floor to ceiling storage units to use every square inch of space. Many closet organizers give you endless options, which allow for a variety of customizable possibilities.
• Find Furniture With Multiple Uses: Place a bench at the end of your bed that opens up into storage space for blankets and pillows. Use a small, 3-drawer dresser as a nightstand. These types of creative pieces will dramatically increase your storage space and enhance the overall functionality of the room.

Eliminating clutter in your bedroom creates an inviting, relaxing space. It will also help you sleep better and transform it into an area you can’t wait to enter every night.

Arrange Furniture for the Focal Points of Your Home

Your living room and bedroom are the focal points of your home. You’ll spend more time in these rooms than any other rooms in your home, so they deserve to look and feel beautiful.

A properly arranged home will also make your gatherings more functional and successful. You’ll have the space and arrangements needed to build stronger relationships, have fun and make memories that last a lifetime.

Has this guide taught you how to arrange furniture in the rooms of your home? If so, please subscribe to our newsletter and stay up-to-date on our newest home tips!