How to Arrange a Long Living Room

You may need some expertise to learn how to arrange a long living room as it can be annoying to see a continuous horizontal line above your furniture. There is also the tendency that your furniture arrangement may make the appearance of your living room worse than it should be.

To get the best out of a long living room, you need to ensure that you employ some optical illusions that make the rectangular room appear square. Also, you want to make sure that no narrow pathways are made apparent due to your furniture arrangement. The more natural light you can get into the living space with a narrow living room, the wider it appears.

This article will learn how to arrange a long living room by employing the appropriate optical illusions, furniture arrangement techniques, and natural and artificial lighting. You will also have some ideas on how to arrange a long living room, attached to each way of making a narrow living room appear wider.

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How to Make a Long Living Room Appear Wider

A living room is meant to be a place of comfort and relaxation. Therefore, it shouldn’t feel like the room walls are right next to you. While your living room may be rectangular and long but have the same dimension as another square living room, it poses some challenges regarding traffic flow and furniture arrangement.

Although the most obvious solution to making a narrow living room wider is to pull down the wall at one end and extend it till you reach a desirable distance, it is a powerful solution to a situation that can be addressed without resorting to such destruction. Here are some ways to make a narrow and long living room appear wider.

No Furniture Next to the Walls

A long living room has more length than width, which means you have more horizontal space than vertical space. This can make furniture placement tricky, and if it is done by placing the furniture close to the wall, it is usually not aesthetically pleasing.

You can make your long living room look wider by removing your furniture from the walls. This creates a pathway behind the furniture and allows you to have a cozy furniture arrangement along the middle of the room. This furniture placement also reduces the emphasis of the horizontal line on the eyes and shifts the attention to the furniture.

Here are some ideas that employ this method of making a long living room seem wider.

Furniture Sideways to the Walls

Place the furniture across the floor space so that the sides of the sofa face the longer walls and the back face the shorter walls. This reduces the focus on the length of the walls and leaves room for placing other furniture sets in the same room. Also, place single sofas in the same manner, but opposite the large sofa, to create a seating area.

It would help if you made this furniture arrangement on one end of the living room or in the middle of the room. The available spaces by the sides of the furniture will create room for feet traffic.

 Double Seating Areas

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With furniture orientation away from the wall and facing the source of natural light, your focus shifts from the size of the living room to the furniture that makes up the seating area. In this living room furniture arrangement, a sofa is at one end of the floor space, a comforter and a table in the middle of the sofa, and the single chairs that make up the seating area.

For added use of illusions, the walls are adorned with designs that bring a vertical perspective to the fore, balancing out the long horizontal orientation of the walls.

Use More Vertical Space

Vertical space in a long living room is often neglected when exploited to create a symmetrical balance in the living room’s appearance. The higher the ceiling of the living room, the more vertical space you have to work with.

To use vertical space to balance the horizontal line of the narrow space in your living room, you need to use tall adornments and designs and pull attention away from the length of the room. Such adornment may be wallpapered with vertical lines or designs, tall furniture such as a bookshelf, or bulbous light fixtures.

Here are some ideas you can employ.

Tall Furniture Beside a Wall

The vertical line of tall furniture such as bookshelf helps create a balance for the long walls present horizontal line. Place the bookshelf next to the wall and away from the other horizontal furniture. If the room is very long, you may have such furniture in two or four different places in the room.

Use Bulbous Lighting Fixtures

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While your long living room needs vertical balancing, it can achieve that by having a bulbous light fixture. The light fixture takes attention away from the walls, representing the room’s width, to the ceiling, which means the room’s height.

Create a Curved Pathway

Unlike the straight pathway for feet traffic created when furniture is placed against the wall, a curved pathway helps create the illusion that the room is wider by encouraging traffic away from the narrow sides of the room.

To create a curved pathway in your limited floor space, you need to add a little creativity to your furniture placement. For example, you can have love seats around a circular coffee table at one end of the living room, creating a conversation area. While another set of furniture may be in the middle of the room, creating a family room with an entertainment center.

Multiple Pathways With Specialized Furniture Arrangement

A large sofa is at one end of the living room, with a circular table in front of it. Although this creates a curved pathway, primarily due to the circular furniture, more pathways are created with the single recliners at the other end of the room.

Judicious use of the room’s horizontal space by using furniture to create pathways that cut across the horizontal orientation of the room makes the living room appear larger.

Curved Pathways With Straight Furniture Pieces

Curved pathways are not created by circular furniture only. Straight furniture pieces, when appropriately arranged, create curved pathways that link with straight pathways. In addition, they help create pathways that lead away from the seating area in many cases.

Allowing space between single chairs placed side by side creates a pathway that leads to another pathway created between the large couch and table and between the fireplace and the table. Depending on the length of the living room, your sofas may be against the wall or away from it.

Circular Furniture Pieces Will Be Nice

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Circular furniture pieces are the best means of creating a circular pathway in a long narrow living room. They encourage furniture grouping and create a unique distortion to the one-way orientation of a long living room. Circular furniture in any living room part is enough to disturb the continuous horizontal view.

Here are some long living room ideas that employ this method to make them look wider.

 Distorting Horizontal Orientation

Ordinarily, arranging furniture away from the walls significantly reduces the extent to which the eyes perceive the length of a long room. However, it is better if some of the furniture is circular and can balance lengths and breadth in the living room.

A circular love seat, ottoman, game table, or coffee table, amid other furniture, helps shrink the room’s length, at least optically. Arranging single chairs around the circular table creates a bigger circle in the room, and it effectively reduces the perception of the horizontal lines by the eyes. The circle in the long room distorts the horizontal orientation of the walls.

Circular Furniture on the Wall

While circular furniture on the floor space is an effective way to arrange a long living room, circular furniture on the wall similarly contributes to its horizontal orientation distortion. However, since the position of the walls is what makes the living room narrow, we can influence the walls to make the room appear wider.

A circular mirror on a vertical highlight in the room does more to make the room look wider than either one of them acting alone. The vertical structure may be a fireplace or any wall space with a semblance of vertical orientation as provided by wall painting or wall sconces.

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Create a U-or L-shaped Seating Area

The right furniture arrangement in a long narrow living room requires working with the room’s shape to minimize the visual impact of the walls’ orientation. To achieve this, an oversized couch in a limited space may seem out of the question, but not totally. Smaller pieces of furniture may seem to be the answer, but not for everyone. Therefore, you should consider installing specific shapes that break the continuous horizontal and narrow wall view.

U-Shaped Seating Area

Creating a U-shaped seating area does not necessarily involve installing U-shaped furniture. Instead, you may have to apply some creativity and arrange your small pieces of furniture so that they form the U shape you have in mind. A U-shaped seating area has equal length on opposite sides of its furniture and a piece that joins both lengths at the base.

Usually, such seating area uses small circular love seats combined with large seats stretching the room’s length. The curvature at the furniture base diminishes the extent of the individual lengths of either side of the furniture and the walls.

L-Shaped Seating Area

The L-shaped seating area operates using the same principle as the U-shaped seating area. However, it does not encourage lengths on both sides of the seating area. An L-shaped seating area is characterized by one long side and a shorter side at a right angle to the longer side of the arrangement. Sometimes, they may be of equal lengths.

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The orientation of the L-shaped seating area emphasizes both length and breadth, reducing the focus on the longer walls of the room. Usually, an L-shaped seating area uses some circular love seats and an ottoman to accentuate the curvature it attempts at the juncture where both arrangements meet.

Demarcate the Room

The most common demarcation for a living room is into a family room, a dining room, and seating and conversation areas. Usually, the dining area is not as large as the family room, and the seating area can function as the conversation area and family room. A long living room can easily be divided into these parts of the living room.

The demarcation breaks the continuous length of the room and focuses on the different possible activities that may occur there due to the different furniture arrangements.

Conversation area and Family room

The family room in this living room doubles as a sort of library that employs an enormous bookshelf that announces the height of the ceiling. The seat arrangement is similar to an L-shaped seat arrangement, and it uses an ottoman and other circular furniture, such as floor lamps, to make that part of the living room as balanced as possible.

The conversation area has an ottoman beside a sofa. Another sofa sits opposite it, and between them is a center table that creates multiple pathways. The presence of circular furniture and the apparent difference in the parts of the living room, as announced by the seat arrangements, reduce the focus on the length of the room.

Demarcating the living room with a Circular Furniture

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This is a genius idea for widening a long living room as it takes little effort to achieve the demarcation and resultant effect of the demarcation. A circular table in the middle of the room separates the conversation area and the family room. The conversation area, which can double as a dining room, employs a concentric furniture arrangement, even though there is no circular furniture among the set.

The family room also combines a concentric seat arrangement and a U-shaped seat arrangement. In addition, the hollow in the walls creates a vertical space use, as does the painting on the wall above the entertainment center.

It will not be unusual to have a corner fireplace with this arrangement.

Final Thought

Different rooms can come in different shapes, and knowing how to arrange a long living room demands that you understand how other seat arrangements influence the room’s focus. Concentric seat arrangements, corner fireplace, circular furniture, vertical space, and more help you successfully arrange a long living room.