If you are planning to buy new furniture for your living room, chances are that you have already thought about the layout of the furniture or you have probably thought about repeating the same old layout with only the new furniture pieces. In this article, I will show you a simple method to create the most efficient design for your living room.
Before starting, there are a few points that need to be taken into account. A living room is always a transitional space. This means that the entrances to all other rooms are in the living room. Other bedrooms, dining room, kitchen, etc. It is accessed through the living room, so sufficient “circulation space” for family members is a must.
So here’s what you can do to create the most efficient layout for a living room.
1) Take a flat white paper. A4 size is also sufficient.
2) Draw a sketch of your living room on this paper. When drawing this plan, it is important to show the following things on it:
a) Entrance door
b) Entrance doors to other rooms
c) Window positions
d) Projections of minor columns (if any)
e) Door opening (inside or outside the room)
f) Presence of stairs
g) Fireplace (if any)
3) Take a pencil and draw lines from the front door to all other door and window positions. These are the natural travel lines for anyone using the living room. If the room is empty and unfurnished, these are the lines that any person would follow to get to another point in the room.
4) Now start placing the furniture units like 3-seat sofa, one or two seater sofa, coffee table, end tables screens, bookshelves, TV unit, etc. Depending on your budget, you can go for any number of these units.
When placing these units, furniture will always be seen to obstruct the pencil path lines drawn in the third step. But that’s fine for now. Now make as many combinations and arrangements of the furniture as possible. Think outside the box while doing this. Try to do something different.
Remember that if you try, you will easily find at least 10 designs for that same living room. You will be surprised by the number of possible combinations. Also imagine the furniture you already have or you can replace that table in the bedroom with the one in the living room.
How about keeping it vertical instead of horizontal in the plan? Whatever you do, keep one thing in mind. Always keep human movement “unobstructed”. People passing through the living room into other rooms should be able to pass without cutting off your vision if you are talking to someone else in the living room.
That’s why those pencil lines have been drawn. Once you have drawn the furniture on the plan of the living room, modify the lines of travel. Now these lines will be around the furniture, especially in the corners. The travel lines will now take the shape of the furniture at the edges.
After this short exercise, you will probably have 5 different designs on paper. Select the one where you see the following points of interest.
a) The lengths of the lines of travel are the shortest.
b) The lines of travel do not pass through the furniture.
In addition to efficiency, there is another factor called visual balance when designing a furniture layout. It finally looks good to you. Are you comfortable with the final design? Visual balance is achieved by making the most of all the walls in the room with decorative elements such as paintings, color combinations, etc.
So if you follow a system from the beginning, you will definitely be able to create a beautiful living room in the shortest possible time. I hope this article has helped you find more creative ways to do this job more efficiently.
Copyright Shrinivas Vaidya