How to Arrange Your Living Room Furniture

The layout of your living room is important to get right. It affects how comfortable guests feel and the overall flow of your home — especially if you have an open-concept living area. To make the most of your space and help you, your family and visitors feel at ease, consider these designer-approved ideas for arranging your living room furniture.

Create functional drama by pairing seating, lighting and even accessories, like ceramics and taxidermy, on opposite sides of your space. A mirror image look, like this one, is especially effective if you’re working with a pair of sofas.

If strict geometry doesn’t float your boat, be sure to offset bulky items, like couches and loveseats, with a coffee table and a pair of chairs. In general, pros suggest leaving at least a foot and a half of leg room between those pieces.

Don’t worry about providing cover for every inch of your space, but do create a relationship between large pieces by planting each of your seats' front legs on your area rug.

Speaking of planting, are you sure that you're arranging your greenery according to its needs? Dramatic species, like this bird of paradise, are a fabulous way to add interest to corners of your room. They also require bright, direct sunlight to thrive (so the corner you choose had better have a window or two).

Interior designers recommend allowing 3 feet of clearance for your room’s main thoroughfares (in this case, the area behind the striped chairs and the sofa). In areas that receive less foot traffic (like the spaces between those pieces and that coffee table), 2 feet will suffice.

Each and every perch at your place should be paired with a spot to set down a cocktail (or a mystery novel — you do you). As in this sleek, midcentury-inspired living room, those pieces don’t have to be large. If square footage is especially precious, keep your eyes peeled for space-saving options like nesting or C-shape side tables.

Resist the temptation to maximize space in the center of the room; instead, create a buffer between the walls and your furnishings. Trust us: as in this space, the intimacy you’ll create (and awkward traffic you’ll avoid) is well worth it.

In an open-plan home, like this one, where living and dining areas flow into one another, use large, low pile area rugs to create subtle distinctions that won't disrupt that marvelous sense of space.

Whether you have a large household or a fondness for entertaining groups, your living room should offer every regular visitor the opportunity to pull up a chair (or sofa, loveseat, ottoman, upholstered stool, fainting couch — you get the idea). The pair of leather side chairs flanking the hearth, in this space, are a clever way to address overflow and enhance the space’s symmetry at the same time.

If neither arranging seats across from one another nor dividing rooms with area rugs strikes your fancy, sandwich a slim console table between your sofas (as in this long, stylish living room) and solve multiple design dilemmas in one fell swoop.

Consider an arrangement that allows access to electronics — in a space like this one, the flat screen television is visible from every seat— without pointing every piece of furniture in the direction of those electronics (which would make the living room feel more like a screening room).

A hearth and well-dressed mantel, on the other hand, are a focal point for this living room. Both the orientation of its seats and visual cues from echoing shapes, in the coffee table and framed artwork, draw the eye to the space’s most significant feature.

A massive, wall-spanning sectional, like the one in this living room, calls for artwork that balances its scale — and a long, narrow abstract canvas is just the piece to do it. To cultivate a serene atmosphere, like the one in this room, pair your furnishings with accessories that echo their size.

Cultivate balance among asymmetrical, assorted features by creating arrangements that are analogous to one another. Here, the black piano and bench echo the crisp French doors and the wide white sofa echoes the weight of the hearth and the credenza beside it.

If your space is full of right angles — as in this living room, where both the chaise and built-in shelving have strong rectangular forms — spark visual interest by pairing them with curvaceous pieces, like this coffee table and armchair. (Bonus points for the acute angles in the abstract artwork above the fireplace.)

Break a massive space into smaller gathering spots to create intimacy. In this artistic home, the day bed at the center of the room is doing double duty. It contributes to the seating area around the acrylic table in the foreground and the marble table in the background.

This warm gray living room is a master class in how to illuminate a large space in an interesting way. It features a central chandelier, recessed ceiling lights, a floor lamp before the windows, a wall sconce and table lamps. Achieve a similar feel by deploying both ambient lighting (the chandelier, ceiling lights and sconces) and task lighting (the floor and table lamps) throughout your own room.

Vary sight lines in your space by choosing pieces with differing heights. In this living room, a woven leather ottoman has an especially low profile and a black armchair stands tall in the right corner.

Speaking of horizons, windows are the exception to that varied height prescription. As this chic green space illustrates, furnishings should never rise above your sills.