Awkward lounge and sofa placement, help!

[Newbie2025]

Hello,

I have an awkwardly shaped sitting room and need a larger sofa but the only place it will fit is in front of the chimney breast.
The fire doesn't work and is closed off and plastered flush so would it be a bad idea to put the sofa against there? I currently have a pretend fire which does give the room a good focal point but don't know if removing this and putting the sofa there is just an interior design no no? (Not that I know anything about interior design) i've attached a floor plan and open to suggestions.

The current sofa is on the left hand wall opposite the fire place but can only fit a small one due to the door locations.

Personally, I wouldn’t. Have a smaller sofa plus chairs instead.

What are the wall measurements ?
Can you close off one of the doors?

@Ilovemyshedmeasurements are on the pic

Could you have two sofas? One opposite the fire and one opposite the window?

Blocking the fireplace will look awful and you will be sat facing two doors which will be weird

We moved 2 years ago (downsized) & have a similar shaped lounge and because we were stuck with our fairly new sofa we had no option but to take out the fireplace. It was only an electric thing, nothing permanent.

The area where you have the small sofa now is more or less a corridor, between the two doors, I would avoid using that as the main sitting area. Have you tried moving the small sofa and adding chairs ?
I have an L sofa in front of a closed in chimney breast. Your view would be toward the window if you did that

These are our before and after photos. Behind me are the stairs, and to my left is the window and door to outside. The sofa could only go in that place.

Corner sofas are great, or two small sofas.
As others have said, I would block up one of the two doors to make the room more useable.

Unfortunately we can't block up the doors as that would have been ideal

Unfortunately we can't block up the doors, i've attached a photo of the current layout although the angle makes the sofa look way bigger than it is

Yeah thats how we feel, and when people are walking through it's like sitting in a corridor 🤦‍♀️ as one door leads to the kitchen and the other upstairs.
We have thought about and L shaped sofa and we've been trying out layouts on chat GPT and it looks ok but obviously its AI so hard to imagine it in real life and whether it would work.
We would put the TV where the sofa is currently but just not sure if the whole room would look odd?

what's on the other side of the stairs? what's behind the stairs? Trying to work out why you can't block one of the doors, or what other options are.

Sorry to jump on this thread but what was your surround made of and did you sell it?

We’ve just had a stone one removed and the man suggested I sell it but I honestly can’t see stone wanting it!

You could ask me to help with your dilemma. Photographs of the room from different points would be useful.

Is it decorative chimney breast or actual one? If the former, I would remove the whole thing. If not, at least the pretend fire, move sofa there and use space around for shelving. Shelf behind sofa is really practical. With thewalk path on the other side, it will feel better. You can make nice focal points on the other wall with nice furniture, art, tv whatever you fancy.

It is an actual one unfortunately and the costs to remove it all together are too high.
It's been blocked up and the fire surround i have there now is just false with a false fire so that part can be removed.

The front door , its a very small house so there's just a square of floor at the bottom of the stairs from the front door and then the door into the living room and then the other living room door leads to the kitchen

It's only wood, i painted it black and then stuck false tiles on it just so there was a focal point to the chimney breast whilst there isn't a sofa or anything in front of it

We took out our electric fire and haven’t missed it for a second. Made the room oddly shaped and was seriously ugly. I love our bigger sofa. So I’d do that no question.

The difference between the OP's room and @BG2015's is that she has a chimney breast whereas @BG2015 didn't - the fireplace they removed was on a flat wall.

I wouldn't want to remove the breast (or just the fireplace) as I think the resulting room plus furniture placement - facing two doors - will look extremely odd. I get that currently it's a difficult space to work with, but personally I'd prefer a smaller sofa and a couple of chairs.

However, if @Newbie2025 felt they had to do so in order to fit a larger/corner sofa, I think it would only be successful if the breast was removed (and a steel added, obviously).

We did the opposite in our downsize cottage. We built a faux chimney breast where we could add a fireplace to give the - larger but very irregularly shaped - room a focal point. As a result we can only fit one sofa plus a single chair, but as this is a second sitting room, we felt the trade off to be well worth it.

We sold it the afternoon we moved in. In fact I think we sold the fire and gave the fireplace away as it was just MDF.

Thank you, you are right about removing the chimney breats altogether but the cost to do so are so high and not comparable to the value of the house in the long run so we thought we either just manage as we are or get a larger sofa, ideally a corner, and putbut in front of the chimney breast but couldn't really find many photos where people have done that to see if it would look right in "real life"

Ah. Then no. I think it would look very odd and you’d have those gaps behind the sofa. Mine came out and I had a flat wall - plastered over it and put book cases along the wall to hide the odd bits of trim we couldn’t get to match up.

I’d try two small sofas that will fit.

Lol. Finally someone who is honest about using ai.

Could you replace the arm chair with a second sofa and then put the telly in the bottom right corner?

I think your fireplace is really pretty.

For all those talking about moving doors and reconfiguring, i assume this is a std victorian terrace, so there is literally no other way to rearrange doors as there are only two downstairs rooms and the two doors go to the kitchen and to the stairs/front door. Is that right op?