Floorplans, aka furniture placement, are agreed to be the bedrock of successful design, vital both to the functionality and comfort of a room, and as such are often named as the start point of every project. Emma Burns, joint Managing Director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, describes establishing “how the spaces flow, and if they don’t, how can they be made to.” It’s floorplans that inform socket and switch placement and plumbing – and, what’s more, says Brandon Schubert, directing me to a paragraph in Italian design firm Studio Peragalli’s book Grand Tour, it was we, the English, who pioneered them, back in the 19th century. “Before that, furniture was generally set against the walls. Tables were brought in occasionally for meals and were provisional. Even couches were positioned against the wall. The invention of a more specific use of rooms created more intimate, welcoming milieus, such as the bourgeois drawing room. Despite the differences in the style and shape of the individual items of furniture, the basic model has remained unchanged.”
There are a handful of notions in circulation that we tend to adhere to, related to the paragraph above: “don’t push the furniture back against the walls”, “every room ought to have a focal point”, “furniture should be arranged around the fireplace” – however we’ve all encountered rooms where the layout, despite following these ideas, doesn’t quite work. It might be that the room feels symmetrically unbalanced, or there’s an odd empty corner, or the chairs in the sitting room are too far away from each other and so angled that conversation feels uncomfortably public. But then, on the flip side, there are rooms that seem to disregard the oughts, shoulds, don’ts and musts – and yet are triumphs. As Brandon says, “the rules are just starting points and should regularly be broken.”
Notable is that even the best interior designers work at floorplans: “the right layout is not always immediately obvious, and planning and experimenting means that, sometimes, we improve on our initial thoughts,” says Lucy Hammond Giles, also of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. Knowing that, it might be worth our examining the floorplans of our current abodes – especially if we’ve got rooms that aren’t working as well as we feel that they might, or if our needs from rooms have changed because small children have become gangling teenagers, or we fell in love with an antique marriage chest at an auction and everything needs to be reshuffled as a result. And, says Henriette von Stockhausen of VSP Interiors, “putting something in a new position in an interior can make a huge difference and lend a whole new lease of life to items.”
Preliminary preparation
If you’re starting at the very beginning then the ideal, says Lucy, is to have an inventory of all your furniture, and measurements. Some might want to use CAD, but Lucy prefers a pencil and paper, cutting out the furniture so that she can move it around her sketched rooms. “You want to position the big pieces first,” she says – on the basis that there are fewer options where they can go, while Emma Burns notes that we mustn’t get fixed on things being in certain places, “a marble-topped commode might look wonderful in your dining room in one house, and your bedroom in another.” You need to think about comfort, and ease, continues Emma – “can you sit and read with a drink and see your book or paper? Can you turn the lights off from your bed?” And you need to think about doors – and what you are opening the door into, which possibly shouldn’t be a blockage by way of the back of the sofa.
“There is really only one furniture layout that will work in a room”
Is a statement that we’ve all heard, but is there? Is there? “I think rooms should look quite ephemeral! They shouldn’t look stuck,” says Nicky Haslam, suggesting that we could try otherwise.
That said, “for most of living in modestly sized houses, the architecture of the room is going to drive the furniture placement,” points out Brandon. “In London, at least, bedrooms often have only one good wall for a bed, and sitting rooms often follow the standard terraced house floorplan, meaning you really only have a couple of choices, assuming you want a sofa and some chairs. And in a smaller room, where there is a fireplace in the centre of the long wall, there isn’t much opportunity to ignore it without making the entire thing feel completely odd. For instance, you can have a corner banquette and smaller chairs, but then where do guests sit when they visit you? Are you all going to tuck over in the corner of your main sitting room?”
But – and there is a but – “as rooms become secondary in function or as they become larger, the list of possible furniture arrangements becomes more flexible,” says Brandon. Lucy mentions a large sitting room that she’s designing. “The client wants it to seat sixteen at any one time – so there is only one possible configuration. But, if the number wasn’t so set in stone, there would be alternative arrangements that could work.” Which isn’t to say that the architecture of the room can be forgotten – “it is still important,” says Brandon “but it becomes easier to start thinking about furniture in a terms of a functional group rather than what the room’s floorplan dictates.” (Of which more, shortly.)
“Every room needs a focal point” (“and ideally it’s the fireplace”)
The reason being that without one, the room can feel confusing and overwhelming as everything shouts for your attention. But, as the late Mark Hampton points out in his book, On Decorating, there are certain rooms, specifically, “those dedicated to the pleasure of a single person”, that are charming to look at because of their “superb clutter of objects” – and defy all known rules of arrangement, including having a focal point. But, in rooms in which we entertain others, the rule applies.
However, even in the sitting room, it does not have to be the fireplace. In Miles Redd’s New York den a corner sofa is pushed up against the back wall, and a pair of chairs face it; the fireplace is behind them. “The fireplace is always there, people can see it, but you don’t have to group the furniture around it,” he says – and in that den, it is the arrangement of seating that is the focal point, just as in a dining room, it’s the table. The great Dorothy Draper, in Decorating is Fun!, suggests that a window can be an alternative focal point, or “if there’s no fireplace, you can use a bookcase to be the centrepiece of the room instead,” says Sarah Vanrenen. Which brings us back to the fireplace – and ignoring it, or not, which Lucy suggests probably ought to be decided by the climate of where the house is, reminding us that certainly in countries where you’d conceivably light a fire, “it’s very nice for the sitting room furniture and chairs to be arranged around the fireplace.”
But what does need to be considered is where the focal point is, for, as Mark Hampton says, it’s position “has an enormous impact on how much seating you can get into a room.” Dorothy Draper’s preference – and the most regularly encountered situation – is for it to be in the middle of one of the long walls (arguably, a corner fireplace, and they do exist, is good reason for not having it as the room’s focal point.) However, Mark suggests that positioning should – or could – be dependent on the size of the room, and how many different seating arrangements you would like to incorporate. If the focal point is on the long wall, depending on size of the room you can probably fit in either one seating arrangement, or three. If the room is a smaller rectangle, but you’d like two seating areas (and they realistically fit) Mark advocates for putting the focal point on an end wall (one of the shorter ones.) Which takes us on to functional groups of furniture.
Creating functional groups in a larger room
Vast reception rooms – or open plan apartments – can feel more cavernous than cosy, and, unless the room is a ballroom or a music room in which you intend to host concerts, are thus often best decorated as a succession of spaces or zones, using functional groups of furniture, “which might be a small seating group, or a games table and four chairs, or a bar area and floor lamp – and so on,” describes Brandon Schubert. By way of example, he proffers Nancy Lancaster’s famous yellow drawing room “which was furnished in quarters,” describes Lucy. “The first quarter of the room as a small entrance, with a round table that held flowers and books on it. The central half was for comfortable seating around the fireplace, and the last quarter had a table to sit at for cards or a light meal. The breaking up of the room into smaller seating areas afforded intimacy, even within the grandest setting.”
Important to remember, says Brandon, is that “you will need thoroughfares, whether that is an open ‘corridor’ between functional groups or just open circulation space” (certainly, having to shimmy around pieces of furniture, or move a chair out of the way to get to the sofa, does not make for a comfortable experience.) Also worth keeping in mind, he continues, is the architecture of the room. Lucy points out that the yellow drawing room’s layout made use of the fireplace, and the windows, and, says Brandon, “don’t forget the ceiling, if there’s a beam or break it may impact the layout.”
Making the most of a smaller room
“Don’t think that a small room needs small furniture,” says Lucy. “It might feel counterintuitive, but bigger furniture will make the room feel bigger in turn.” Pointing out that the layout needs to work particularly hard, Lucy confirms that a small room is the place to break Nicky Haslam’s rule about rooms needing to feel ephemeral – a small room can benefit from bespoke, built-in furniture, whether that’s a banquette that also contains storage space, or a box bed. Which, of course, breaks another of the rules.
“Don’t push all the furniture up against the walls of the room”
Unless, that is, you aspire to the pre-19th-century look. Though, as Brandon notes, “one of the big challenges of pulling furniture off the walls is that it creates empty walls,” while Nicky Haslam talks about “achingly bad corners.”
Brandon explains that “a well-crafted interior should have a foreground, middle ground and background, just like a well-crafted painting,” – the idea being that you should add in enough other elements “to make sure the perimeter of the space feels full and regularly obstructed by furniture.” For example, if you pull the sofa out from the wall, you might have a narrow console against the wall behind it, with a mirror or a picture over it. And Nicky suggests that for corners, you “make freestanding shelves or something you can use to store objects and books.” Alternatively, there are chairs, banquettes, side tables – and more. Of course, those pieces of furniture are flush to the wall – the key word in the rule is ‘all’, as in, don’t push all the furniture up against the wall. Also important to note is that this rule is more applicable to some rooms than others. Few desire a loo bang in the middle of a bathroom.
Functional rooms
Kitchens, bathrooms, pantries, laundry rooms and boot rooms are all rooms where function must come before form, i.e. it’s more important to have a loo than it is to have a loo that you don’t see immediately you open the bathroom door. So, while there are ideals when it comes to floorplans for these rooms, they cannot come at the expense of need, or – in the case of a kitchen – a preferred mode of operation. Only you will know how close your toaster needs to be to your hob.
That said, with a bathroom, you probably want the bath to be the focal point (if you put it under the window that will further draw the eye), you want the basin to be close enough to the window that the mirror above it benefits from good natural light, and, says Emma Burns, “you want to be able to turn on your shower without getting your arm wet.” With a kitchen, you want sufficient countertop space adjacent to the hob, the dishwasher on the correct side of the sink for whether you are left or right-handed, and, if it is a kitchen diner, you want the lighting circuits to be such that you can turn out the kitchen (and thus expunge from sight any piles of washing up.)
“Symmetry makes a room more comfortable to live in”
Symmetry as a principle of architecture and design pre-dates the 19th-century floorplans by centuries, going back to classical times. There’s good reason for applying it: “regard for symmetry, besides satisfying a legitimate artistic requirement, tends to make the average room . . more comfortable to live in,” wrote Edith Wharton in The Decoration of Houses, and Philip Hooper, joint Managing Director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, explains that it helps “the eye rest easy.” It’s why Dorothy Draper advised shopping for chairs in pairs, and advocated for “twin tables, twin lamps.”
You can go too far; too much symmetry will give an overly “stiff, formal effect,” Dorothy warned – while Benedict Foley says that he finds such a situation “unnerving.” More positively, Philip points out that overturning it will “create a far more interesting dynamic” – and that it is balance that can be aimed for, more than perfect symmetry. This, says Dorothy, can be achieved by considering the mass of items when doing floorplans, even if they are different shapes. For instance, a piano is equal to a break-front bookcase, a sofa can be offset by two chairs – or a longish table with books and lamps on top, etc.
Finally…
“If you are the sort of person who likes to glance up from a book and out of the window, by all means place your pet armchair by that window,” says Dorothy Draper. “There’s no law that says it can’t turn its back to the whole room if you want it to. A room that is really comfortable for you will be the room that is most becoming to you.” And, says Emma, don’t try too hard: “the least successful and least comfortable rooms are the ones where everything is too perfect.”
