When it comes to placing your lounge suite, what may start off as a simple question can quickly become complicated when you consider all the factors that go into making a living room livable. In this blog article, we’ll discuss all the things to consider when placing your lounge suite in its final location.

What seats are we placing down?

The first thing to consider when placing down your new lounge suite is to consider what your lounge suite actually is. 

Are you purchasing two “his and hers” recliners for your empty nest living room, or is it a fully fledged lounge suite to fit the whole family and extendeds? The type of sofa being placed down can massively alter where it should put down.

In this same realm, your lounge suite's “main” seat should be in the prime position for its purpose. Whether it’s “Dad’s recliner” placed directly in front of the TV, or the chaise lounge portion of the sofa being where it’s going to catch the most sun for those Sunday naps.

What are you using your lounge suite for?

When you’re placing down your lounge suite, consider the “central” purpose of the room that you’re requiring seats for. 

There’s no shame in it, it’s the modern family hearth nowadays anyway, but if your main purpose for your lounge suite is for watching the TV, then we’d recommend treating it as a central point of interest. As such, your lounge suite should orbit your screen to ensure that everyone can easily view the screen no matter which seat they’re given.

However, if the point of your lounge suite is to encourage conversation, then it could be ideal to have them facing each other, either parallel or perpendicular depending on the space. It also helps to have a piece of furniture such as a coffee table or a rug to imply a “shared space” between sofas.

Obviously, it’d be ridiculous to have different sofas for different purposes, especially if you live in a confined space, but how you place your lounge suite can alter how people interact with it so keep that in mind if you’d like to treat your lounge as either a home cinema or as a communal space or both at the same time!

Use the ⅔ rule!

When placing down a lounge suite, the ⅔ rule can be a dead giveaway if it’s going to work in your living room or not. But what is the ⅔ rule?

The ⅔ rule is fairly simple: the furniture in your room should take up roughly two-thirds of the floor space of the room, with the other third being left free to easily move about within. As such, a lounge suite easily takes up a majority of those ⅔’s so it’s important to ensure that the other furniture doesn’t push too far past that ⅔ limit.

The video attached below also shows how you can use this rule of thirds to add some style to your living space:

Don’t Face Away From The Door!

When placing down a sofa, ensure that at least the main seating has a clear view of the main entrance to the lounge, as the living room is the main communal space of the house and as such, should be inviting not deterring.

This is also important for those sitting in the living room, as you’ll be able to quickly see who’s entering or leaving the room with a simple glance. Especially with the rise of smartphones and the normalization of frequent headphone usage, this means anyone can easily catch your attention from the doorway without needing to sneak up and spook you when you’re heavily invested in a Tiktok scrolling session.

However, if your space means you have to face away from the door, we’d recommend using the back of the sofa as a sort of half-height wall. For more compressed spaces, this means placing it perpendicular to the door frame to essentially create a mini-hallway. 

Meanwhile for large spaces like shared kitchens/lounges, you can have a sofa facing away given that there’s still some way to detect someone behind you, either from having another sofa to view from or having the sofa be lower in the ground so the person behind is easily viewable, only with a bit of a craned neck.

If you've got an awkward living room layout where you can't avoid this however, then the below video should help in creating a layout that works for you!

Can You Easily Maneuver Around It?

Your lounge suite should be an extension of the walls of your living room, but it shouldn’t be a barricade to accessing any portion of your lounge. As such, ensure you’re able to easily access any area around your lounge suite without risking a stubbed toe or grazed shin.

This also applies to any additional features your sofa may bring, from recliner seats to seatside compartments. Ensure that your recliner is able to fully extend without any obstruction, whether it’s pulling back the coffee table just that little bit, or providing that small amount of room between the backrest and wall. Also ensure you’re easily able to reach any couchside amenities, from recliner levers to remote pockets, without the need to crane your hands in awkward angles.

If there’s a space between sofas that’s not really a walkway and not going to be used for anything else, we’d recommend placing a lamp table to help fill the space. This helps utilize what would otherwise be an unused piece of space, instead making a great home for anything from photo frames to Wi-Fi routers and smart speakers.

Does your coffee table fit your lounge suite?

When placing down your lounge suite, the synergy it has with your coffee table can really make or break its placement. As such, using the ⅔ rule for your sofa and coffee table can ensure your suite works like milk and honey and not like chalk and cheese.

The ⅔ rule in this situation is fairly simple: The width of your coffee table should be roughly ⅔ the width of your largest sofa. Sofas and coffee tables come in a variety of shapes and sizes, so roughly is definitely the load-bearing word here. But it’s still an easy rule-of-thumb to follow to ensure your living room is easy to maneouvre around.

If your coffee table is a bit too big regardless of the orientation you place it within your living room, then it could be worth considering changing out your coffee table entirely! We’ve already made a blog post on how to choose the perfect coffee table so it should be easy enough to get a coffee table that properly synergizes with your lounge suite!

Consider clearing clutter!

If your new lounge suite doesn’t comfortably fit in your living room no matter the configuration, then it may be time to consider clearing extra clutter in your room to make space.

Whether it’s a buffet that’s a bit too big, or a TV unit that juts out just a bit too far, figure out what part of the furniture isn’t synergizing with the lounge suite and causing issues. If there’s another part of the house that the offending furniture can be rehomed to, then that’s great! But if it has to stay in the room or can’t find a room elsewhere, then this is where your options start sounding a bit more bleak.

In this situation, your options are to either replace, redistribute or remove. In the case of something like a TV Unit, you can either replace it with a smaller unit or remove it and instead wall-mount your TV if that works better. But in the situation of a bookshelf, you can again replace it with a smaller unit, or redistribute the contents of the shelves across your home, filling up empty shelves and surfaces in other rooms that may need more attention.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by the end of this blog post, you should’ve given your new lounge suite its “forever home” in your living room! Whether it was a first-time perfect fit or required a bit of finagling to get it seated in your lounge, the hard work is now done!

All that’s left to do now is to enjoy your lounge suite, and how you do that is up to you! From movie nights to coffee catch-ups to board game nights, enjoy your new lounge suite to the fullest!

FAQ

Where Can I Purchase A Quality Lounge Suite At An Affordable Price?

If you’re in New Zealand and looking to purchase a quality lounge suite then great news! We offer a variety of sofas and lounge suites to suit any type of home with affordable delivery for most locations!

Outside of New Zealand however, we would recommend using us as a blueprint for what you should be looking for in other parts of the world. We’ve actually made another blog post on how to choose the perfect lounge suite for your home which should help with what to look for when purchasing a sofa for your home!

Is It True Placing Your Lounge Suite In The Middle Of The Room Will Make Me Seem More Upper Class?

In Short: Not really. The long of it however is that it depends on a variety of factors but a majority of them mostly come down to two factors, space and wealth.

When you see a sofa in the middle of the living room of a more affluent home, it’s because the sofa is being treated as a wall or space holder for a larger area. A larger home comes at the cost of needing to fill more space with “stuff”. But most people of affluence also like a clean, minimalist aesthetic, so into the middle of the room the sofa goes.

The other half of this equation then turns into: do you have a sofa worth placing in the centre of a room? Because many examples of sofas styled this way are also very designer in how they look, with the couch being more of an art piece than a form of seating.

So placing your sofa in the room will not make your living room look “rich” unless the house and couch itself are of value on their own. So unless you tick those two boxes, then we wouldn’t worry about the placement of your sofa.