Is your room so long and narrow that if you walk in you start searching for black balls with 3 holes in them and suddenly get the urge to wear sticky shoes with a major size amount on the back? Hey, bowling alleys are great! They are one of the few places where I could chew bubble gum and blow giant bubbles without even the slightest embarrassment.
Well, if you don’t love the ambience of a bowling alley, the following tips for furniture arrangement in long, narrow spaces will give you rooms that are functional and do not look like a tunnel.
Pangaea Interior Design, Portland, OR
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1. Keep the foot traffic to one side. One of the primary difficulties in organizing furniture for a long, narrow room is where to have people walk through. The number one thing to prevent is sending your foot traffic involving a seating piece and the coffee table in front of it.
This condo’s main living spaces are one long rectangle with tall ceilings that made it feel even slimmer. You can see there is a French door to the patio on one conclusion…
Pangaea Interior Design, Portland, OR
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… and looking another way you can see that the front door is at the opposite end. So we retained our furnishings to one side of the room to allow the foot traffic to move in a direct line between the furniture and the fireplace. The ottoman is near the sofa so people can put up their feet. That, together with the L-shaped sectional, prevents anybody from attempting to maneuver through the room between the sofa and ottoman.
Hint: Ensure any area rugs are placed in order to walk them over or can stay completely off. From the room over, the open area on the area rug is broad enough to let people walk right across it. The hearth is flush into the ground, so that you can also stay off the carpet and walk through without crossing the carpeting.
It is really annoying to have a rug hit halfway into a pass-through area so you want to walk through with one foot on and one foot away from the rug. Should you require a custom size to make this happen, an inexpensive solution is to buy you like and have it cut down and jump.
Chelsea Atelier Architect, PC
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This room uses exactly the same principle, but this time the furniture faces away from the pass-through location. You want a little broader room to do this. Maintaining an open area to one side of the room effectively produces a hallway with the living spaces to one side.
Jace Interiors & CreateGirl Blog
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2. Place furniture in a corner arrangement with the foot traffic drifting across space. Inside this living room, the door opens right into one facet, and a console table keeps you from walking straight down that side. But because the furniture was placed in a nice conversational grouping in one corner, people can easily walk through the room beyond the furniture at an angle across the carpeting.
They were wise to avoid attempting to put another seat in here, which would have made the pass-through too tight a squeeze. The display in the corner is also a nice touch in a narrow area because it visually changes the form of the room somewhat, rounding the corner out.
Hint: Simply say”no more” to too many pieces of furniture. We’re often tempted to cram in an excess seat for the maximum seating, even if we only have guests a tiny percentage of the moment. Rather, consider double-duty pieces such as the ottoman from the above photograph which can work as seating when additional people are there.
Nicholas Moriarty Interiors
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3. Place a few furniture perpendicular to the amount of the room. In this room, if they’d placed a long sofa facing the fireplace, from the time you set a coffee table in front of it, you would need to walk right through the sitting area to get by. Additionally, the room would have looked more and skinnier! By using loveseats instead of a longer sofa, they could place them perpendicular to the amount of the room with space left for a pass-through area down the side of the room. I know wide-angle lenses used for professional photographs make rooms look nice and big. But based on the furnishings, I estimate that this chamber isn’t over 12 feet broad.
Jennifer Brouwer (Jennifer Brouwer Design Inc)
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Judging from the loveseat at the conclusion of the room, I bet you that chamber is about 12 feet broad. That tiny loveseat across the conclusion of the room helps to stop the eye. Without the loveseat in front of the big window, it would feel like the room just didn’t cease, exaggerating the long, skinny feel.
David Vandervort Architects
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4. Put some furniture on an angle. To decrease the feeling of tunnel vision, try an arrangement with a number of your furniture within an angle. By most people’s standards, this isn’t a terribly narrow room. But it’s much more than it is broad, so it might readily get that bowling-alley look with the wrong furniture arrangement. They really had room to set their complete sectional on an angle, breaking up the long straight lines of the room.
Pangaea Interior Design, Portland, OR
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This narrow room is used by my client for a TV room. They also wanted a small home office area where they can work in their laptop and some papers.
Fortunately, the door into the room is in the center of one side, therefore we did not need to permit foot traffic throughout the room. We placed a sectional at the ending with the TV.
Pangaea Interior Design, Portland, OR
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On the other end of the room we placed a small writing desk and angled only the dining table. It keeps the room from feeling quite as long and that angle can help to specify another functional area. I like the desk faces into the room — I despise desks that face the wall, do not you? I feel like I am being punished if I must sit facing the wall.
Architects Magnus
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Placing a long sofa facing the fireplace would not have done much to divide the bowling alley texture in this lengthy room. The arrangement of four angled chairs makes this conclusion of the room feel wider.
Lea Frank Design
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5. Circular coffee tables and dining room tables operate nicely. In this very long room accommodating a sitting room and dining room, the round coffee table and dining room table help to counteract the linear feeling you can get in narrow spaces.
Rachel Reider Interiors
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6. Narrower options for coffee tables are great too. Sometimes you do not have room for a round coffee table. This extended rectangular ottoman works perfectly in a narrow area and is tender, so that you won’t bang your shins.
Niche Interiors
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Small decorations, cubes or chow tables are ideal as options for coffee tables in narrow spaces. Notice they also used a loveseat and chaise facing each other and perpendicular to the length of the room very similar to picture No. 5. This is a very compact furniture arrangement that would operate in all types of small spaces.
Stacie Velten
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7. Utilize the top part of your walls to allow maximum floor area for furniture. Creating bookshelves up high on this wall instead of having a bookcase standing on the ground makes it possible for the daybed to be placed beside the wall. The shelves are large enough so that you do not bang your mind when sitting down.
Birdseye Design
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Should you require free-standing storage bits, putting them at the end of the room keeps it from appearing skinnier. Notice that again you are seeing the chairs bits placed perpendicular to the amount of the room.
Allow me to know how you dealt with your long, lanky room and put those up photos below!
More: 11 Area Rug Rules and How to Break Them