How would you arrange a long but skinny living room?

[TeamSteady]

Hi All,

I am absolutely useless when it comes to conjuring up ideas or visualising anything for myself so I thought I would turn to the collective wisdom of mums net!

Ok, we have an offer on a house with a long skinny living room. At it's widest it is 18'10x9'11 but it also has a fireplace on a long side that eats into the width of the room. It has french windows on one end, which i would rather not block if possible.

I'm hoping I've managed to attach two pictures to this post, one of the floorpan and another as to how it is currently laid out, with two sofas along the long wall opposite the fireplace and the tv unit.

I think this accentuates the narrowness of the room. Any ideas as to how you would do it instead?

It's a bit of a change for us as our current living room is a perfect square 16x16! Sadly this means I will be having to get rid of our much loved, super comfy but HUGE 7+ seater corner unit.

Thanks

We have a slightly bigger room but it's sort of divided into two at the moment with settees in a rough square around the fire and a table & chairs in the other half

Ours is a bit like that. We have our sofas and tv at one end and the kids toys and a playmat thing at the other so the room is kind of divided into two.

We have a long thin living room and have sofa and chairs at one end and DD's desk at the other end (we also have a separate study and dining room) but study has the distraction of computers in and we wanted somewhere for her to work without that as well as have school books and own academic bookshelves. Before we had the desk it was a play area with toy box etc. Once DD is at uni we might swap the dining room and living room round and have a smaller cosy living room and have the current living room as a music room come dining room.

Definitely divide use into two halves - top half and bottom half. Probably makes sense to have TV, etc up the top (against RH wall, with sofa opposite). Bottom half you could use as a separate non-TV seating area, or have lots of bookshelves put up to make it a kind of library. Either of you play the piano? That would look good down bottom end... Kids? Play area down bottom end. Do you have a separate dining/ eat-in kitchen? Otherwise you could have a dining table at bottom end.

The key thing is to not 'block off' the fireplace (i.e. you want to be able to sit and enjoy the fire - so possibly have a rug in front of fireplace? And a couple of smaller armchairs that you could either face towards fireplace or towards respective halves of room depending on your need.

Ours is a lounge diner too. We could move the dining table into another room but then I wouldn't know what to do with that end of the room. Having just extra sofas would be odd.

If you need to have sofas up the patio doors end, could you do a couple of small chairs (tub chair style) in the corners that end and a sofa against the long wall, maybe with a small sticky out thing defining the other end of the loungey bit? A round rug in the middle perhaps. Or could you put sofas up the other end and use the patio end for something else?

I'm sure someone more stylish would be more creative, but with a fairly narrow room like ours and a woodburner, I've never figured out how to place sofas other than against the wall. Anywhere else gets too close to the fire.

I would have two armchairs dividing the room. A Sofa is very much a barrier. You can move around/between chairs but they also define the lounge end of the room. At the other end I would consider a table and chairs but only if you need them. If you have a dining room, do you want this formal set up in the lounge when you have it elsewhere? How easy would this space be accessed from the kitchen? Alternatively look at bookcases and seating so it is zoned for a quiet space.

What are the rooms next to the lounge? Can you make it open plan? I think that would be my favourite solution by the way!

Thanks for all the advice :)

The lounge is off the downstairs hallway and there is a (long and skinny!) playroom next door which leads to a utility room and then another exit to the garden.

I don't want to knock through. I have had an open lounge/diner in our current house, and I'm now really looking forward to having a dining space in the kitchen. I don't want to have an dining table in the living room.

I like the idea of creating a second space for reading. We have a LOT of books (we have had to empty and shift 6 bookcases in our current house to make it feel more roomy for viewings, ugh!)

A friend suggested we keep the corner unit and use it to block off a space for watching tv and snuggling up, so slightly longer side down the l/h wall, and then the shorter side across the room close to playroom door, so sofa puts people around the fire. I'm worried that there won't quite be enough of a gap to comfortably get past- only 60cm.

I've done a sketch... a great work of art no less...

Think it would work? Red is the sofa, blue bookcases, yellow tv and unit, green... a friend of mine came up with a great idea, i thought. She suggested getting a local carpenter to make a mirror mounted on a hinge with shelving/storage behind it. Then it would hopefully bounce light from the french windows, windows in that room, plus the other french windows in kitchen back around the room, plus it gives us a handy storage option which hides unsightly junk and uses up an otherwise dead space.

What do you think?

Mine is exactly like that layout. We need to keep it that way as the fire is are only source of heating and it gets very cold here.

Is the utility room only accessible via the family room? That's interesting. Don't suppoose you'd consider making living room and family room one large kitchen/diner and having the living room where kitchen currently is?