Please help me with my living room layout

[Helbee88]

Please help me to work out the best layout for our living room.

It’s a good size room but has 3 doors on different walls which makes furniture placement difficult. It has also been extended in the past and has two structural columns/beam approximately half way down the long walls which makes things even more challenging!

I have tried to attach a photo with what we currently have in place. It just feels like there is a lot of wasted space but I can’t figure out much that would work.

The red L shaped marking on the picture is a sofa, the green rectangle is a coffee table and the yellow lines are where our radiators are positioned. I have also drawn (badly) where the pillars are in black.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Re-hang the door from the hall so it sits flush with the right hand side wall. You’ll need to move the light switches to the other side too.

Then move the cable boxes for the telly to the long left hand side wall, and ‘lose’ the uprights within joinery. You could have a pair of bookcases with a fireplace (—plug in faux logburner —) in the middle on that long wall. Then much more of the room would be in use, so you could have armchairs as well, and you could see the garden, and the telly wouldn’t be the focal point.

Thank you. That’s a great idea regarding the door. I quite like the idea of losing the uprights too with the use of bookcases etc.
Where would you put the sofa/armchairs/tv in that scenario?

if there is space, I might rotate the sofa 90deg so the back of the sofa is on the wall with the hall door, with a view out to the garden. then I'd put the TV at an angle a bit further along the wall it is now on. I'd add a giant comfy armchair pretty much where the word 'living' is on your plan. Ideally one that is easy to move so it could face the TV or the sofa or even turn to face the garden in the summer.

and I'd definitely have lots of bookshelves with books / photos / decor on at least one other wall (either from pillar to garden door, or where the TV is now or both).

The door at top right - do you need / use it frequently?

If not then can put furniture in front.

I'd put a desk or toy area at the bottom of the room. TV on the wall next to the French windows. Sofa in front of the un used door. Armchairs or second sofa across the room looking directly out into garden.

Like this

Unfortunately the sofa would block the doorway if we rotated it as it’s pretty long. We are considering getting new sofas though so this could work with different furniture I think.

We do need to use the door at the bottom of the room frequently as it’s a bedroom. The property is a bungalow and has been extended with a rather poorly thought out layout. The diagram is really helpful though. I’m now wondering if we could have the sofa down by the french doors opposite the bedroom door. Thank you both for your ideas.

Is there an opportunity to use another room as your reception room? It must feel a bit peculiar to have a bedroom off your sitting room.

Could you add a corridor space?

To answer your question, if you’re using your current sofa, you could have it parallel to your garden doors, with a console table behind it to make it look more deliberate.

I really like that desk suggestion too.

This is what I'd do but I have a lot of books and love a reading area with a fire/log burner

It is very peculiar to have a bedroom off the living room yes. It was the only property within our budget that ticked all our other boxes but we do hope to extend at some point in the future and will definitely look to alter this!

I’d never even considered using another room as a reception room actually. We just continued to use the rooms as they had previously been used. That’s an interesting idea.

You guys are so much more imaginative with furniture layout. I think our current furniture is restricting our options so some more versatile pieces like those in the diagrams you’ve done would work so much better.

Thanks everyone.

Do you have a full floorplan? A bungalow gives much more flexibility with rooms and a stud wall to improve the layout may be worth the effort

Yup i want to see a full floor plan too - it might be worth moving or even removing a door into the living room but it’s hard to see where/how without seeing the adjoining rooms.