10 Living Room Layouts That Are Absolutely Ruining Your Apartment
Your living room is where you probably spend a lot of time at home. It serves many purposes, from entertainment to television. Sometimes it even serves as a dining room. Because it’s home to so many activities, figuring out how to set up your living room often presents challenges. Instead of giving you ideas on what you can or should do, here are some things you should avoid when deciding on your living room layout to make sure it remains practical for your everyday needs.
1. Keep your sofa in the corner
It’s easy to think that putting your sofa in a corner will make the room bigger because it frees up more space in the center. However, when your sofa is in a corner, it often becomes difficult to place other furniture around. Your coffee table will be off-center, there will be open, unused spaces that won’t be functional, and the room will look lopsided.
Make sure there is room at both ends of your sofa, whether you center it on a wall or float it in the middle of the room.
2. Have wallflower furniture
When you want the room to look open and airy, your first instinct may be to push all the furniture up against the walls to keep it out of the middle of the room. But it will make the room smaller – it almost looks like your furniture is trying to escape.
A few floating furniture throughout the room will make it feel airy, as there will be a lot of paths to move around, both in front of and behind the furniture.
3. Incorrect spacing
Spacing in your living room can make or break any layout. Not keep enough space between furniture easy walking and moving around the room will not only make it strange and cramped, but it will make the room impractical and uncomfortable – just what you don’t want to happen in your living room. And on the other hand, too much space will make the room empty and you will have to shout during conversations, which, again, is inconvenient and uncomfortable for everyone.
Leave enough space to walk between furniture without hitting objects (usually around three feet) in the main walking areas and one to two feet between sofas or chairs and accompanying side tables.
4. Place large pieces of furniture on one side of the room.
An unbalanced room is not what you want in your apartment. It doesn’t mean that your living room needs perfect symmetry, but you need to maintain a balance. Placing your large pieces of furniture on one side of the room will upset the harmony of your living room. For more balance, place larger pieces of furniture next to each other and incorporate smaller items like side tables, lamps, and plants between the larger pieces.
5. Unbalanced light
Not having good lighting in your living room will make it awkward, gloomy, and gloomy. Positioning your furniture according to the light sources will properly illuminate the room. There is no reason to place all of your lamps on the same walls as all of the windows since the windows already provide some natural light.
You can also keep this in mind when working with mirrors to better reflect natural light throughout the room – placing mirrors on opposite walls as the windows will illuminate the room, rather than hanging mirrors on the same ones. walls as windows where they cannot use light properly.
6. Block traffic
Depending on the layout of your apartment, you may have to walk through your living room to get from one room to another. Traffic is heavy and creating a living room that does not have a clear walking path will make it difficult to use the living room, but especially when you just have to walk through it. If there is no way to easily navigate the room, you will have a hard time living there.
Identify the different points in the room (i.e. a reading chair, a door, etc.) that you use frequently and look at the direct path you would take to get there if there was no other furniture in the room. Then place your furniture around these aisles.
7. Excessive furniture
Your living room doesn’t have to look like an obstacle course. And when there is too much furniture crammed inside, the room will feel small and cluttered and it will be difficult to move around. Sometimes it’s better to just remove furniture from your arrangement, rather than awkwardly rearranging it over and over again. If there is too much stuff, no matter how you organize the room, it won’t work.
Keep the amount and size of furniture commensurate with the room – this can mean either getting rid of some of your furniture altogether or replacing it with dual-purpose pieces.
8. No focal point or goal
Each room should have a focal point that highlights one of the main features or purposes of the room. Your living room can be used for many things including daily conversations, watching TV, and entertaining. When there isn’t a clear focal point or purpose of the room, it just makes things a bit messy.
You need to center your furniture around your TV for comfortable viewing or create a seating area where people can watch each other while chatting and have a place to make drinks and snacks. Or if you have a fireplace, center the room around it to showcase the fireplace as a part of the room.
9. Lack of separation of activities
As mentioned earlier, your living room can host a multitude of activities – sometimes they all happen at the same time. Not creating a designated area for certain purposes in the room will prevent it from functioning as it should.
You can have separate and designated areas in a room, such as an office, main conversation area, dining room, and reading nook, where each activity can take place respectively.
10. Gather the furniture
In some cases, you might think that having furniture touching each end or corner will open up more space in the room. But when your sofas and chairs are all touching end to end or corner to corner, even if you’ve created a clear walking path across the room, it will look wobbly and firm.
This can also apply to large U-shaped modular elements designed as a continuous cabinet. You can consider separating the rooms to keep the room from looking closed and uninviting.
Make a plan
Each apartment living room will have its advantages and disadvantages, whether it is the size, shape or location of the windows. Finding what works for your living room can take a bit of brewing and experimentation. Planning your living room layout using the tips we mentioned above will help you get an idea of what will or will not work in your living room before you have moved all of your furniture.
