The British living room is organised around two fixed points that were decided before anyone moved in: where the chimney breast is and where the television goes. Our assessment across the housing stock we serve is that these two things, more than any regional preference, determine the shape of the seating, the position of the sofa and the character of the room.<\/p>\n
In cities with large amounts of Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing, the chimney breast is present, the alcoves either side are the only deep storage available, and the room is usually a rectangle with a bay at one end. In cities with more post war and modern housing, there is often no chimney breast at all, the walls are flat, and the room is squarer. Those two starting conditions produce visibly different living rooms, and the difference is architectural rather than cultural.<\/p>\n
In a terraced or interwar living room, the chimney breast projects into the space and creates two alcoves. These alcoves are the most useful storage opportunity in the room and the most frequently mishandled. Their depth is often less than the 45cm of a standard sideboard or display cabinet, which is why generic furniture frequently protrudes past the chimney breast line and makes the wall look untidy.<\/p>\n
The practical answers are shallow depth furniture, wall mounted shelving or made to measure joinery. Where a freestanding piece is used, a bookcase is often a better fit than a cabinet because bookcases are commonly shallower, and a unit from a modern bookcases UK<\/a> range will usually sit closer to flush with the chimney breast than a deep cabinet will.<\/p>\n Modern rooms without a chimney breast have the opposite problem. A flat wall offers no natural place for anything, and furniture floats along it without an anchor. In these rooms a wide low unit gives the wall a horizontal line to work to, and the room reads as more composed as a result.<\/p>\n The corner sofa is chosen more often than the room supports. In a square living room of around 4m by 4m, a corner sofa is efficient: it uses two walls, seats more people per square metre than separate pieces and leaves a clear central area. In a narrow room of 3.2m wide, the same sofa consumes the width entirely and leaves a corridor rather than a room.<\/p>\n Narrow rooms are better served by a three seater along the long wall with an armchair opposite or at an angle, or by two two seaters facing each other. This keeps the walkway clear and gives more flexible seating positions. A three seater at around 200cm to 210cm wide fits comfortably along a wall in most terraced living rooms, while a corner arrangement generally needs at least 2.5m on the shorter leg to work.<\/p>\n Seat depth is the specification that matters most and gets the least attention. A deep seated sofa at 60cm or more of seat depth is comfortable for lounging but pushes the front edge of the sofa further into the room, which in turn pushes the coffee table out and shrinks the walkway. In a small room a seat depth of 50cm to 55cm preserves considerably more usable floor. Anyone comparing options within a corner sofas UK<\/a> range should check the overall depth of the unit, not only its length.<\/p>\nSofa shape against room shape<\/h3>\n