How To Arrange Your Living Room Furniture

Redesigning a living room from scratch can be a little daunting, plus buying furniture can be an expensive and time-consuming task, and it’s one you want to get right first time as it can be costly to do over again. Use our living room furniture guide to help you decide which pieces you want to include in your space. Once you’ve decided on all the pieces of furniture you want to introduce into your room; you’ll need to think about how to arrange your living room furniture to maximise your space and create a functional as well as a cosy family living room for you and your family to enjoy. Deciding on the living room furniture layout is a sensible place to start.

Plan your layout

Before you start lifting and moving heavy pieces of furniture, let’s start with the basics. A simple but effective way to trial some living room furniture arrangements and examples is to draw the size of your living room to scale on a piece of paper (use graph paper for ease). Then, using another piece of coloured paper or card, cut out the shapes of the furniture you plan to put in your living room (also to scale). You now have a representation of your intended living room and can move the ‘furniture’ pieces around as much as you like, without even breaking a sweat. This might seem like an overly conservative step, but believe us, you’ll be glad to have done it if it saves you costly mistakes and time-consuming furniture returns.

There are now plenty of online room layout tools that you can use to make this process much easier. Here is a list of handy online living room furniture layout tools.

Our Two Top Tips for How To Arrange Your Living Room Furniture:

1. Choose a focal point

Choose a focal point, whether that’s the TV, fireplace, picture gallery wall or a beautiful bay window, this will help you centre yourself in the room and start to think about the best places for your furniture. Do you want to make the most of a bay window with a statement chair to draw the eye to this architectural feature, or will this be more of a communal space where furniture needs to be facing one another?

2. Make seating a priority

The layout of your sofas and chairs is the most important part of the arranging process. Will this be a TV room, a social space for talking, or a quiet place for reading and relaxing? Deciding on the purpose of the room will help you arrange your living room furniture accordingly. Do you want your furniture facing each other to promote a social environment where people can chat easily; or do you want it pointing towards a screen for family film nights?

Remember a sofa doesn’t have to be flush against the wall, nor does it have to be at a right angle. Sofas can be placed in the middle of a large room to split it into two different zones; a chaise sofa or corner sofa is particularly good for this purpose. Likewise, sofas can look very effective at an angle – we like the idea of two matching sofas facing one another for a socially interactive living room space.

We’ve created a Pinterest board full of ideas and helpful tips for how to arrange your living room furniture. Follow our Pinterest board for ideas on living room arrangements, small living spaces and narrow living room arrangements. These living room furniture arrangement examples are designed to help you figure out the best way to arrange your living room furniture and organise your space.