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 , 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.”
An Eliza Bonham Carter painting hangs in the main seating area of this harmonious flat in west London, where a sofa by Intro Papadatos and a Vittorio Introini ‘Scultura 190 Lounge Chair’ – reupholstered by Susan Osbourne in Pierre Frey’s ‘Teddy Mohair’ velvet – surround the Gary Gutterman coffee table on an antique Persian rug.
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.)
