Designing for Comfort...Figure Out the Perfect Furnishing Plan BEFORE You Shop

Ways to make mountain rooms more comfortable for living.

Think seriously before you set up the furniture in the great room. Select upholstered seating that is inviting, accommodating and comfortable. Always, always, always, measure your room, and draw the furnishings on graph paper before you go shopping. Mistakes are very expensive, especially since most people don’t correct mistakes, and just end up living with them.

Here’s a secret I use that works perfectly in setting up a happy room. When you draw in an 8 foot sofa, imagine it has three people sitting on it. Each lounge chair has one person and a love seat has 2 people. Put a person on each cube, or ottoman, too. Now, arrange your sofas and chairs where you think they work best on graph paper and then ask yourself whether these people can converse comfortably. Try to imagine whether they feel cozy? Can they hear each other? Is this intimate?

Now find a place to put the TV. If you can place a TV so that it can be viewed comfortably and your room still works for groups to congregate and relax together, you have a successful floor plan. Keep rearranging until you find the best furniture plan possible.

This is a room I worked on for a client. Here are only a few of the furniture plans I looked at. These were drawn on Autocad, but graph paper works just as well.

I always play around with a half a dozen floor plans before I make up my mind. Sometimes I end up at the first one that came to mind, but other times I come up with something way better. Regardless, because I've drawn it on paper, I know for sure that the furniture will fit in the room correctly and the room will function well.

This is the final selected floor plan of the room sketched above.

Here are two photos that show how that room eventually turned out. We added a couple of cube ottomans between the sofas and the fireplace that get used for extra seating when the room is full of guests.