Planning Your Living Spaces

Your living spaces are the rooms you spend your time relaxing in during the day and evening, and are the spaces that most define the spirit of your house. A living space needs a comfortable seating area, possibly a separate activity or smaller seating area, and a focus or two such as windows with a view, a fireplace, or a TV. Living spaces should also be designed for easy access but without primary traffic crossing across the room. Let’s take a look at how we can accomplish all of this.

Figuring out what you want

Before you start planning your living space you should be sure to figure out what you want. We’ve all lived in at least one house or apartment and most of us (in the U.S. at least) have lived in a lot more than one. These experiences can give you an idea of what you like or don’t like and what worked or didn’t work. However, be sure to think through how you WANT your new room to be, not just what’s worked OK before.

Your day-to-day living space should reflect how you want to live, should be comfortable to be in, and should provide for any activities you’ll want to do in the space. Decide if you want separate living spaces such as a formal living room and separate family room, and whether you want other uses combined with your space such as dining, game or study areas, or multiple seating groups.

Once you know the type of space you want figure out what furnishings will go into the room and what their relationship should be in the room. Seating options vary widely so you’ll want to determine what you want for furniture and how big those items will be. Accessory pieces such as end tables, coffee tables, side tables, display or shelving units, and others should be considered, along with tables and chairs if you want to integrate game or dining areas.

Make a list of everything you want in the space, what you want to group together such as seating groups, and include the sizes of the pieces you want. If you have existing furniture that you’ll use in your new home you can measure those yourself.

If you want new pieces you should research the types of furniture you want and select options that most represents what you want. Use one representative piece and its size for each desired item for your planning efforts.

All of this information will be the basis of the plan for your new living space. Let’s take a look at these in more detail.

The basics of furniture

Furniture is what you use daily. That comfy or beautiful sofa, sectional, lounge chair, or recliner are likely the most important pieces in the room for you. You’ll need to “accessorize” these with side tables and coffee tables so that you have a place to sit drinks or food and a place for lamps.

Additionally, you might want a table for games or dining and display cabinets or shelving units for your collectibles and books.

Let’s take a look at the criteria you can use to place these together effectively.

Planning principles

Planning principles guide you in laying out your new living space. Below are the principles to keep in mind:

Size for comfort and conversation. It’s easy to go wild with large rooms and throw in a lot of furniture spread out through the room. However, interacting with others is more important than going big. Your primary furniture group should be placed such that you have roughly 7 feet to 9 feet from person to person when seated. Accounting for typical furniture sizes you’ll need roughly 10 feet to 12 feet across in floor area.

Account for space between and around furniture. Placing furniture too close together or too far apart is the main challenge in planning. Below are some guidelines:

• Coffee tables: Provide a minimum of 18 inches from the largest piece of furniture in your seating group to a coffee table, and up to roughly 2 feet or so for other furniture depending on the size of the coffee table in relation to the furniture arrangement.
• End tables: Allow for 4 to 6 inches between the table and the furniture its serving.
• Circulation behind furniture: Provide 2 feet-six inches from a wall not used for circulation to other rooms, such as space to access windows you’ll want to open or space to access built-in shelving. Provide a minimum of 3 feet for circulation to other rooms.
• Secondary access at furniture group corners: Provide 18 inches to 2 feet.
• Game or dining table clearances: Provide at least 3 feet from table edge to a wall, 4 feet from table edge to a hutch or side table, and 3 to 5 feet from other furniture depending on how the chairs relate to the furniture. These dimensions allow for comfortable circulation when the table is in use.

Strive for an “island” seating group. A room is more comfortable when you don’t feel cramped. This goes for furniture as well. Design a room that allows for the seating group to “float” within the room so that seating is pulled away from the walls rather than pushed against them.

Plan multiple points of access to the seating group: Don’t force people to step across others to reach a place to sit. Lay out the furniture so that you can access the seating from two or more locations. Designing a floating seating group facilitates this best.

Account for the three focus points: Our contemporary homes tend to have three things people want to see simultaneously when seated: Windows, the fireplace, and the TV. This can provide interesting challenges, especially when you want to see all three at the same time. Steer away from having the TV over the fireplace to solve this issue as the TV will be uncomfortably high for viewing. Instead, you can plan the seating group as an “L” so that you have two walls to place the focus elements.

Stay away from corner bulk: People often put a fireplace diagonally in a corner of the room to solve the three-focus problem. Don’t do this if at all possible. Such a fireplace becomes an odd bulk that makes the room feel smaller and breaks the consistency of the typical rectangular-shaped room. Keep the fireplace on a wall instead.

Provide for doors when open. Though contemporary plans in the U.S. tend to be wide open to other spaces, some cultures still separate the living space from other spaces with doors. Also, many living spaces now connect directly to a patio or yard. Be sure to account for space when the door is opened or to remain open for periods of time. A doors should swing against a wall when open, whether at a corner or fully back against the wall when centered in a room.

Don’t circulate diagonally across a room or through a seating group. This is one of the biggest problems with small houses and older houses and often occurs when people design their own houses. Don’t force primary circulation connecting other parts of the house through the middle of a room. This disrupts the intimacy and comfort of a seating group.

Connections to other spaces

Connecting to other rooms and areas of the house or to a porch or garden is an important thing to consider when planning a living room.

We discussed diagonal circulation in the prior section. Its preferable to not circulate through the room at all to get from one part of the house to another. However, ,today’s open planning concepts that becomes more challenging.

If you need to plan circulation from one side of a room to the other keep the path along the edges of the space, providing at minimum 3 feet of width from the furniture to the wall, but preferably 4 feet.

When any circulation runs behind a sofa its best to provide a long sofa table at the back of it. This helps hide the back of the sofa and helps anyone sitting on the sofa to be comfortable when someone walks behind them.

Formal vs. casual

Most of us today want houses that are comfortable and casual. However, there are some house designs and plans that call for something more formal. One method to accomplish formality is to have a separate formal room.

The other way to integrate formality is to just work with the spirit of the plan. If your plan has some organizational formality – think symmetry and axial relationships – you can still have a comfortable room with a formal furniture layout. Casual has more to do with the furnishings styles than furniture layout.

Formal living rooms

Though formal living rooms have become less common in U.S. homes today there can still be good reasons to have them. If you host a lot of large gatherings such as social parties or fundraising events, having a living room is a must.

Such spaces should be large enough to accommodate the size of groups attending, have furniture layouts and groupings that allow for larger as well as more intimate seating groups, and should have ample circulation around the room and preferably multiple points of access into the room to allow for ease of movement into and out of the room.

Casual family room

Most of us today live casual lives in our homes. Our living spaces are a place to be comfortable and relax, to participate in table or video games, and a place to just hang out with your family and friends to visit or watch a movie or sporting event.

This casualness has led to the disappearance of the formal living room. It has also led to the open plan concept where spaces flow from one to the other without significant separation. This also accomplished the effect of having larger and more spacious rooms even in smaller houses.

The secret to casual planning is to address the planning principles discussed above while keeping in mind which spaces the room will open to or share.

Living and Dining

The first open space concept involved opening the independent dining room directly to the living room, leading eventually to having both in a single space. Historically, smaller houses tended to have separate eat-in kitchens that were fully separated from the living room, and larger houses tended to have formal entry foyers that would separate the living room from the dining room.

Opening the dining room to the living room began in the early twentieth century, especially with the development of the bungalow. Bungalows typically had a living room at the front of the house with the dining room beyond that and the kitchen at the back of the house. The dining room would be separated from the living room with broad openings, sometimes with low built-in dividers incorporating cabinets, shelving, and sometimes decorative columns.

Larger middle class homes still tended to have formal living and dining rooms with separate family rooms through the mid-twentieth century. However, as our lifestyles became less formal those rooms started to disappear.

Today we tend to have just one large space that houses the seating area and the dining table in the same room. The dining table does double duty, also acting as a game table and a place for arts and crafts.

Great room

A common planning practice that started in the late 20th century is the “great room”. This is a large space that incorporates the living, dining, and kitchen areas into one grand space.

The idea behind this was to allow everyone in the family to be together without mom being in a separate kitchen, allowing her to oversee the kids. This also addressed the tradition that visitors tend to flock to the kitchen to visit with the cook and to access drinks and food. The kitchen island with seating came out of this allowing for visiting without interrupting the food preparation.

The challenges with the great room are noise when meals are being prepared and the tendency of kitchens to be messy. Their designs can be beautiful and impressive, but you have to make an effort to keep the kitchen clean after preparing each meal to maintain that beauty or to provide some screening raised above the counters to help hide any mess. Seeing a messy kitchen while you eat isn’t nice.

Impact of ceiling heights

Though ceiling heights are not a direct aspect of planning for furniture and activities in a space it’s something to keep in mind when planning and designing the overall house.

Proportion of a space both horizontally and vertically is important. Mid-twentieth century houses began integrating vaulted ceilings in the living spaces, such that the ceilings sloped up from opposite walls to a common ridge point in the center of the room. An alternate design was the sloped ceiling where the slope rose from one side with the high point at the opposite wall.

The purpose of these ceilings was to make houses and rooms feel larger and these ceilings became very popular.

Mid-century houses, especially the common single-story ranch house, tended to have lower-sloped roofs so the vaulted ceilings heights tended to be only two feet or so higher than the lower walls. However, steeper and taller roofs, taller ceiling heights, and two story houses became more popular in the late twentieth century and continues today.

The danger with these taller roofs is taller ceilings and slopes creating disproportionately tall spaces. The popularity of two-story homes led to two-story living spaces, creating very tall rooms. When not handled properly these taller spaces can start to feel cavernous rather than comfortable, where you feel overly small in a space that’s too big.

Conversely, you don’t want to be in a room that feels too cramped with low ceilings that make you feel constricted. People have responded to taller ceilings for this reason,and today larger houses have started to use 9 foot ceilings. Really large houses with large rooms even use 10 foot ceilings.

Long narrow rooms with very tall ceilings will tend to feel as if you’re in a canyon. Large rooms approaching square shapes with very tall ceilings will make you feel small, lost in a big space.

All photos and graphic images are by Cayl Hollis unless noted otherwise.

Top photo by Craig Klomparens, courtesy Tilton, Kelly + Bell