How To Choose The Right Couch For Your Room

From a visual and comfort standpoint, your couch plays a big role in your living room. If it’s too big, then all of the other pieces of furniture will look dwarfed in relation to the sofa. If it’s too small, then the room may look a bit hollow. The trick is to find the right size of sofa for your room. Here are some things to keep in mind when you’re shopping for a couch.

General Guidelines

Let’s start with the basics, a rule of thumb. Generally speaking, you want to keep the ratio of your couch-to-room at a two-to-three ratio. This follows the rule of thirds and is a good ratio for all the pieces in the room. For example, your coffee table should fit this ratio in comparison to the couch. A chair might be one-third the size of the couch and so forth.

“The rule of thirds and is a good ratio for all the pieces in the room.”

Oddly-Shaped Rooms

Oddly-shaped rooms do pose an additional challenge to finding a sofa that might fit. For example, the room may be particularly long and one sofa may not fit the two-to-three ratio. Conversely, the room may be small and boxy, which may also create some challenges when it comes to finding the right couch. In these cases, you may find sectionals to be good options. You can rearrange and adjust the pieces so that they fit the space proportionately.

Creative Solutions to Problems

Sometimes, no matter what you do, you just can’t find the right couch or get the right fit for your living room furniture. In these cases, you may want to employ some optical illusions to make the couch look more proportionate to the room. One simple trick is to buy a sofa with no arms. The armless sofa will more easily fit into the room, at least from a visual standpoint because it looks less bulky.

Other Solutions

Sometimes, you have to break the rules a bit to make your furnishings fit well into your room. In this case, it may be in your best interest to ask yourself if you can get away with not having a sofa at all. Instead, you can create seating from stacks of cushions, lots of fluffy chairs or a chaise lounge. Smaller pieces actually offer a good option in that you can still employ the rule of thirds ratio, which will make the overall appearance of the room look balanced.

While there is a general two-to-three ratio that you want your couch to have in relation to the living room, the fact is many rooms present the home decorator with problems. In this respect, it’s good to keep the proper ratios in mind, but at the same time, be willing to experiment with other options until you find the right solution.

By Ani Oakes