Room layout and furniture planning - Part 2

Room Layout and Furniture Planning Part 2

Once you have the key elements of the furniture plan down, it's time to add in layers and lighting.

Adding Layers and Lighting to the Furniture Plan

Taking another sheet of tracing paper, you can now begin to layer additional decorative elements and lighting onto your furniture plan.

These layers can help with the proportion of a room – for example, in a large room it can be helpful to create a large focal point in the centre with tall vases or a big pendant lamp. If a central focal point isn't possible, you can aim to create height and interest at both ends of the room.

When it comes to planning your lighting, consider not only which areas of the room need to be lit but also the height at which you want them to be lit. I tend to avoid too much overhead lighting, preferring instead to light rooms at eye level and lamp level, which is much more flattering.

Thinking About Seating Arrangements

Different people will prefer different kinds of seating, so I like to include a mixture – both slouchy and relaxed seating, as well as more formal upright seating. These unconscious courtesies are important to design into a household that will be hosting often.

Adding Scale to a Room

A visual play of different heights in a room is important. There are many different ways of achieving this – a couple of techniques I tend to employ are incorporating low pendant lights or ceiling fans and using tall plants such as indoor palms.

Learning From Mistakes

Working out the optimum layout for a room takes time, and you may end up going through various iterations before you land on the final version. If an area of your room isn't being used very often, evaluate why and learn from its failures to make the revised layout better.

Your Assignment

Create a furniture plan for a room in your home. This could be a room that you're intending to completely renovate, in which case you can start from scratch and begin to plan how the room might take shape. Alternatively, it can be interesting to take a room that you're quite happy with, but see how it may evolve into something even better through the process of applying this process to its layout.