AN EASY WAY TO POSITION FURNITURE

Jul 1

Jul 1 AN EASY WAY TO POSITION FURNITURE

Have you heard about all the rules for positioning furniture? It can be a lot to get your head around and sometimes all you need is a quick fix to work wonders.

And that’s what I’m sharing here: an easy peasy trick for placing furniture that takes five minutes and makes a big difference to how stylish a room feels.

So, for this style update, we're going to take it nice and easy. Sweating over colour palettes*, internet trawling, big revamps and renovations can wait for another day.

This is something you can do right now - this minute - to improve your place for free. And then relax and admire.

*By the way, if you are struggling to find the right colour scheme, I have three easy tips that will sort you out.

But, for now, we’re going back to the hack for placing your furniture…drum roll please.

POSITION YOUR FURNITURE AWAY FROM WALLS

That’s right, pull your furniture away from the walls. It’s that simple but completely magic. Anyone can do it and it makes rooms look much more stylish.

If you have a small space, you might be thinking this tip won’t work for you. But hold on a second…

My living room measures just 3.20m by 3.95m at its widest and longest points. We used to have our sofa pushed right up against the wall because we needed every single centimetre. The thing was, it looked squashed up and tight-fitting.

We've shuffled the sofa forwards a few centimetres and things look so much better. The room is more relaxed and the sofa has room to breathe. Plus, those few centimetres we’ve lost don’t make any real difference to the amount of space in the room.

Positioning the sofa just a few centimetres away from the wall is much more relaxed.

This trick also works with chairs, and I know it can be difficult working out just where to place them. The default position is often to have them clinging to a wall like a limpet.

You might need to play around a bit to get the right spot, but the starting point is to just move the chair away from the safety blanket of the wall or the comfort of a corner. Do that and things begin to look a lot more confident.

Take a look at the picture below. The chair looks pretty squished up in that corner there, doesn’t it?

With this position next to the wall, the poor chair feels so left out!

By moving the armchair out of the corner and on to the rug (in the pic below), it becomes part of the 'seating/chatting/watching TV' area. It's joining in. It looks confident, instead of the nervous wallflower in the picture above.

Bringing the chair into the room makes it feel part of the conversation (if chairs could talk)

TRY MOVING TALBES AWAY FROM WALLS TOO

This trick isn't just for sofas and chairs. I've seen some really amazing images on Pinterest (of course) of home offices where the desk is in the middle of the room.

And check out this ‘before and after’ with my dressing table. Below, is the default, pushed-up-against-the-wall situation. It’s a bit sad and drab, isn’t it?