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You have to think about furniture arrangement in every room, but it’s especially important in your living room.
Your living room is where you sit and talk to your partner or roommate at the end of the day, where you hang out when you have friends over, and where so many of the conversations in your home take place. You want the room to encourage conversation and make it easy for people to talk to each other. And the best way to accomplish that is with the right furniture arrangement.
Today, we’re going to focus on living room seating. Where you put your TV stand and side tables matters too, but if you get the seating arrangement right, everything else will fall into place.
Create a Conversation Area
Creating a conversation area is the most important thing you can do in your living room. It’s the foundation for a great design and it will make the time you spend in your home more enjoyable.
If you’ve been working on your living room layout for a while now and you just don’t love it, you probably haven’t created a successful conversation area. Until I started learning about this concept, I thought my living room furniture arrangement was pretty good. I had a two-seater couch and an accent chair on one side of it, creating a kind of L-shape. It was fine, but I didn’t love it and I couldn’t figure out why—until I started learning about conversation areas.
A conversation area is nothing more than a seating area that encourages conversation. Conversation areas make it easy to talk to the people around you without having to turn your head and twist your neck into an uncomfortable position. To create one, you want to place your furniture in such a way that you’re always sitting across from someone, either directly or at an angle.
Establish a Shape for Your Conversation Area
There are three core living room seating plans that will almost always work well, though they won’t all work in every space. When you’re deciding which option to try out in your living room, it’s important to consider how much space you have to work with and what you use the room for most often.
If you have friends over every weekend, you want to have plenty of extra seating, but if you never really have more than two or three people in your living room at once, you don’t need a massive conversation area. In fact, you might want a smaller one that brings people closer together.
The best seating arrangement is the one that works for you, so keep that in mind while reviewing the options below.
The U-Shape
The U-shape seating arrangement is exactly what it sounds like—seating that’s arranged in a U shape. This could be three couches; a couch and two accent chairs; a couch, an accent chair, and a stool—you can really play around with it to make it yours (and to utilize the furniture you have until you’re ready to buy). But the end shape of the seating area should be a U. No matter where you sit in the seating arrangement, you should be facing another seat, so if someone were sitting across from you, conversation would happen naturally.
A U-shape seating arrangement leaves a gap at the opening of the U, which gives you the perfect place to create a focal point for the room. Traditionally, you would arrange your U around a fireplace, with the fireplace situated right in the opening. But for those of us who aren’t blessed with a fireplace (yet) the opening of the U is a great place to put your TV stand.
The Square Shape
A square shape is a very traditional living room seating arrangement. You tend to see squares in big, formal living rooms where there is plenty of room so the boxy seating arrangement doesn’t overwhelm the space. You might even see a square shape in a room that has multiple separate conversation areas (think a game table with a square of seats around it and a U-shape situated around a fireplace on the other side of the room).
Square-shaped seating plans are beautiful and can allow for close, conversation among a small or large group, depending on how big your square is. Four club chairs make the perfect square, but you can use any type of couch/chair/bench combination to create your square.
The Eleven
The eleven is not the most ideal shape for a seating arrangement, but sometimes you just have to work with what you’ve got until you can afford to work with what you want. The easiest way to create an eleven shape is to arrange two small couches so that they’re facing each other. This does ensure that you’ll always be sitting across from someone when the seating area is full, but it only really allows for conversation with the person directly across from you, or with everyone at once. The U-shape and the square shape, on the other hand, make it easier to have mini conversation areas within the greater conversation area.
