Please help - layout and furniture arrangement for a long living room

[littledaisy85]

After living in boxes for months, we are now finally coming to the more exciting part of our house renovation project stage I.e. getting furnitures! But after some serious brain damage we really struggled with what to do with our living room. It is a long room measuring 6.5m long x 5.3m wide, sitting at the back of the house opening out to the garden through a big sliding door. It is the only living room of the house so we hope it can serve multiple purposes including being a place to watch TV, as a sitting room for family/friends gathering and a relaxing reading corner for ourselves. And In the future we would also like to be able to have some space for kids to play.

I tried to sketch out a few rough design but are not happy with any of them. I attached one of them as an example below (probably one of the better ones I came up so far but DH is not impressed) So please give me some ideas how we can best design and use this room. Thanks a lot!!!!

It's a big room. Perhaps draw sofas into a smaller area away from the walls, pointing at tv/fire. How close do you want your tv to your sofa?5m seems an awfully long way away to me.

I agree that the sofa looks a bit too far. I think my main issue is that the room is wider than most but not quite wide enough that we can create another zone/area behind the sofa if we put the sofa closer to the TV and fireplace. Ideally we wanto create two zones I suppose. One for TV watching/lounging and one fire reading etc. Also I am a bit concerned about filling in the room with too much furniture at the moment. Once the DCs come along we won't have any play place for them...Hmm...

I think your room is nearly square, hence the problem with layout. My room is this width but longer. I have a long settee opposite the fire and two chairs at right angles. Plus another side chair for pulling up when we have visitors. This is about 5m x 4m. We have another 4m plus looking over the garden and we have a table and occasional seating. I think you could either have your tv near the fire or have it in a space left over at the end of the formal seating. Having movable chairs helps with flexibility. My lounge opens up to the kitchen and the tv can face either way.

I don’t think your room is big enough for all the zones you want, so limit it to two. I don’t see how a snug area can be incorporated. Children just means you need storage for toys. The use of our lounge didn’t change.

Don't be afraid to leave gaps. Children will play wherever there's floorspace.

I think I'd create a lounge area round tv, maybe put a console table behind one to make a kind of reception area zone behind (though that would be somewhere you pass through as adults). Then at the other end, reading area. You could do reading zone in opposite corner to tv and a storage unit in the other, which would gradually get overtaken with toys and merge into reading area as a play zone as children come along. Or you could have 2 identical bookshelves/dispaly units, creating symmetry either side of the fireplace. Work 2 zones round those along with your main focal points - fireplace and window. From a distance the symmetry will draw the whole together.

I think you need to decide what your focal points are. Fireplace, big window or both? Maybe point 2 main sitting areas at those and work tv location round that.

I don’t think I’d bother with zones and would just get a massive comfy monster U or L shaped sofa so you can lounge, watch TV, look out of the window and read on it in different positions.

Again thanks everyone for the great tips. I went back to the drawing board this weekend and come up with two revised potential options. Any feedbacks would be highly appreciated! Note that A means the door to the living room from the corridor. B is the opening to the dining room. It is a fairly small dining room so the dining table ends about 20-30cm from the living room border. C is the sliding door to the garden. Here is plan A

Again thanks everyone for the great tips. I went back to the drawing board this weekend and come up with two revised potential options. Any feedbacks would be highly appreciated! Note that A means the door to the living room from the corridor. B is the opening to the dining room. It is a fairly small dining room so the dining table ends about 20-30cm from the living room border. C is the sliding door to the garden. Here is plan A

And plan B looks like this

I like plan B better, the 2nd set of photos because it (the smaller chairs) give easier access to the dining room and it looks less crowded.

By the way, could you buy some very comfortable chairs (not traditional dining chairs) for your dining table and use them in the lounge too?

Glad you are making progress OP.

I think fluffywuffy is right actually. I was thinking 6m is a deep enough room that you have to zone it but with a big sofa like that it's not overlong. Having more sofas would make it a more inviting, sociable space and you could centre it round the fire which makes sense. Think big U shape, with one end good for tv watching and the other extreme the reading area. I'm averse to moving sofas away from walls but in this case I think it's right.

My worry with plan B is every time you go to sit on your sofa with a cuppa, or take cup back after, you'd have to navigate through the reading area.

You can afford to get much deeper furniture, the TV stand is very long and straight which doesn't help with the room proportions. You could get something that fills in the corner more.

I think I'd have a 2-seater sofa, a 3-seater sofa and some easy chairs, you can then move around to suit.

It’s a shame there is a corridor between the two exits from the lounge. A chair at the end of the dining table will protrude into the lounge and your table sounds too big for the space. 20-30 cm is no space at all so this will look a bit odd in my view. I would have the dining room as your reading area and your dining at the end of the lounge. Or open it all up.

Thanks for the tips and comments everyone! After agnozing it over the weekend, DH and I decided to go with plan B. The main reason that sways our decision is that 1) having chairs closer to dining room leave more empty space for DC to play in th future and easier for us to supervise from kitchen/dining area 2) having Sofa at the other side will allow better TV viewing the experiences (less chance of view obstruction when people enter the room via the door from corridor).

Now it is furniture shopping time!!!