Design Dilemma: Arranging furniture when your front door opens into the living room

My front door opens directly into the living room. If you've been following along, you know I really struggled with how to decorate the living room. I've set the room up in many different arrangements trying to work around the door until I found one that really stuck.

What I learned from shifting the furniture around the room and actually living in the different set ups was just how important designing for traffic flow is when you’re arranging the furniture.

Some of the arrangements caused stress and a feeling that something was off. You can tell when you try moving around the room and you feel frustrated or friction or it feels hard.

So how do you design a good room flow?

The first thing you should do is draw out your floor plan and mark where you want to be able to walk with arrows from one doorway to the next. This can be a super rough sketch, you just want to be able to see the walk paths.

Here is an example for the first floor with the traffic patterns from the front door marked. You can see why this room was so hard to decorate. There are a four different traffic paths to accommodate and this room isn’t that big. Where there are arrows from one doorway to the next are walk paths that I want to make sure I don’t block with any furniture.

Next you can start to layout furniture and then check it against your established walk paths. Here is one of the arrangements for the furniture that didn't work for me. It’s easy to spot that three of the walk paths are blocked with furniture here. This is a great example of a room where you think it wouldnt be that big of a deal — you could just walk a little more to the right to get around to sofa. But, you feel the friction each time you have to carefully navigate through furniture or when you walk through the sitting area to get to the office.

I used the original drawing for the walk paths or traffic patterns in the room to direct where to my furniture. If I had started here when designing the room I could have avoided the multiple different set ups. With four traffic patterns, once they were marked it's very clear where the couch should go based upon its size and to avoid traffic. Pretty much every other option I considered was eliminated. There is still a walk path through the sitting area but it doesn’t overlap any furniture and by choosing the right sizes for the sofa and console, it works!