Scale is one of the most important elements to consider in any room. Don’t believe me? Take any interior decorating course you can find online. They’ll all tell you the same thing: pay attention to scale—especially when you’re buying furniture.
If you have endless cash, this isn’t really a problem. You can just buy new furniture every time you move to make sure it's the right scale for the room you’re putting it in. But if you’re like me, you don’t have endless cash. You might not have any cash.
In reality, you’re moving into a new apartment and you’re bringing the couch you bought off Craigslist for your college apartment. You might be able to reupholster it. If you’re like the crazy kids on Tik Tok, maybe you’ll even paint it. You can change the color and the fabric, but you can’t do anything about the size. This is where we run into a problem with scale. Your big, bulky couch isn’t going to look quite right when everything else in your apartment is much, much smaller.
Are you worried? Don’t be!
You’re not destined for a sad, ugly apartment just because you can’t afford a new couch. Is it ideal to squeeze a massive piece of furniture into a tiny space? No. But that’s okay! With a little creative balance (another term you’re going to hear a lot if you’re on a Design Baby journey of your own), you can make it work.
Here’s how:
Use More Big Furniture
If you’re stuck with a couch that’s way too big for your living room, your first thought might be to surround it with teeny tiny accent tables and chairs to make it look smaller. But sticking a minuscule coffee table right in front of your giant sofa is going to make it look bigger, not smaller. Plus, the scale will be way off.
Instead, you want to try and match the scale of the couch with other big items. Don’t go too big, though, or you won’t have any floor space left. Instead, try to use mid-sized pieces that can stand up to the bulk of your couch without crowding the space too much. This will make the proportions feel harmonious and bring balance to your living room.
Go Long and Lean with Your Coffee Table
When you’re trying to match your big couch with furniture of a similar scale, look for long, narrow pieces instead of short bulky ones. A big square coffee table may match the scale of your couch, but it won’t match the scale of the room. Instead, use a narrow coffee table that’s almost as long as your couch. The idea here is that the table will match the scale of the couch without taking up a significant amount of space or making the room feel overstuffed.
Don’t Cram in More Furniture than You Need
With a couch taking up 70% of your living room, you don’t want to crowd the space with a ton of extra furniture. It's fun to have a bar cart, but not if it takes up so much space that you can’t actually host a party.
Think about what you really need to have to make your living room functional. That might just be a couch and a coffee table. And that’s okay! You don’t need to create a grand seating area to have a cute apartment. Let your big boy couch be the main attraction, and don’t overfill the space you have left with unnecessary furniture.
Mount Your TV
You might need to have a TV, but you definitely don’t need to have a TV stand. If you put a huge TV stand directly across from your huge couch with a coffee table in the middle, your living room is going to feel (and look) super tight.
Instead, just mount your TV! You can hide the wires with cable concealers to keep things looking neat and you’ll be able to give the space some much-needed breathing room to help balance things out.
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