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How to furnish narrow living room


Ideas for Decorating a Long and Narrow Living Room

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Lauren Flanagan

Lauren Flanagan

Lauren Flanagan is an interior design expert with over 15 years of experience writing, editing, and producing articles for renowned Canadian publications and shows for HGTV on home decor. She worked in high-end home decor retail before discovering her passion was to share what she knew in publications and on television.

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Updated on 12/10/21

The Spruce / Alyssa Vela

If your living room looks like a long hallway, use a few clever illusions to open up the space so you don't feel like you're living in a bowling alley. You may be tempted to push furniture up against the walls in a long, narrow living room to open up the space, but the effect will only highlight the shape of the room, making it feel longer and narrower. Minimize tunnel vision in your home with ideas to manipulate the space.

Watch Now: 5 Clever Tips for Decorating a Narrow Living Room

Form a Straight Walkway

Creating a pathway for foot traffic in a narrow room is tricky. By tweaking your arrangement, you'll create an intimate atmosphere instead of an awkward footpath through the middle of your furniture. Arrange a seating vignette on one side of the long wall of your living room. For example, place a sofa up against one wall and pull close two chairs that face the couch. By creating a small seating area, you've created a clear path behind the chairs on the opposite long wall of the space. The effect is a well thought out sitting area that isn't interrupted by foot traffic.

Create a Curved Pathway

Break up a lengthy space by creating a curved path through the room. Achieve this visual trickery by using both long walls for your furniture and dividing your space into two separate seating zones. You can quickly sketch this out for yourself or use a free room planning app so you can see the curvy pathway on paper. For example, here are two zones that create a curved flow in a long, narrow living room.

As a result, you've broken up the tunnel feeling of the room, maximized the space with two zones, and created an easy flow throughout the living room.

The Spruce / Alyssa Vela

Pull Furniture Away From the Walls

Furniture pushed up against a wall in a narrow living room emphasizes the length of the space. Instead, pull all of your furniture away from the walls and float a seating arrangement in the middle of the room. It helps even if your furniture is only a few inches away from the walls. The result will be a cozy seating area with two narrow walkways on either side of the sitting area.

Use Circular Pieces

Eliminate long horizontal lines with furniture that has soft, rounded edges. There are several easy ways to break up an abundance of straight horizontal lines.

Tip

Along with round furniture, consider upholstery with circular patterns and use round area rugs that call the eye to the floor.

The Spruce / Alyssa Vela

Create an L- or U-Shape Seating Area

Place a sofa on the wall and put a love seat or two chairs perpendicular to the couch to break up the length of the room. Add another love seat or set of chairs on the opposite side of the sofa to create a U-shape seating arrangement. It's another way to create a path along the opposite long wall of your room.

Divide the Space

If your room is particularly long, divide it into two separate zones. Consider two different conversation areas. A seating area and a small office or dining area is another option to make the most of the space. Use area rugs to define each area. Help the two spaces appear organized and orderly by placing all of the legs of each piece of furniture on the rugs.

Tip

Consider creating two zones in a long, narrow living room by using one piece of furniture. Place a sofa perpendicular in the room and put a console table or short cabinet against its back. Use the table or cabinet as a desk for a small home office zone.

Maximize Vertical Space

Draw the eye high by making the most of vertical space. A tall armoire or bookshelf breaks up an expanse of long horizontal space. Move the eye upward by creating art and photo arrangements that go high and close to the ceiling. Hang floor-to-ceiling drapery, preferably with vertical stripes, to create the illusion of height.

Watch Now: 3 Ways to Make Your Small Space Appear Bigger

Long Living Room Ideas - Narrow Room Design Tips

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Interior Design

Living Room

by Eleanor Büsing

published Sep 22, 2018

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Long, narrow living rooms (or family rooms) can be a chore to lay out and decorate, not to mention live in. Nobody wants to feel like they’re entertaining in a train carriage or watching TV in a hallway. But with some layout tweaks and a few visual tricks up your sleeve, you can learn to love your long room. Here are five ways to lay out a long, narrow living room, plus some bonus tips on how to really rock the space.

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1. Create Separate Zones

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Often, long rooms are a blessing in disguise, because they can serve as open-plan spaces. Instead of having one larger-but-awkward living room, why not create a smaller living area, plus a den, study area, or breakfast nook?

In the sketch above, we have a traditional TV area (which you can create with a smaller sofa to save space)inte, plus a cozy den-like conversation nook, complete with surrounding wall-to-wall bookshelves to really delineate the space. You can also zone these separate areas with rugs, lights and/or color so it feels intentional.

2. Alternate your Furniture Groupings

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If possible, try to avoid having all your furniture on one side of the long wall. By alternating furniture groupings, as the space above does, it forces the traffic flow to take on an “S” shape, and avoids half the room just feeling like a straight hallway. It’s a sneaky way to ensure you actually use more of the space.

3. Arrange Things Across the Space

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When working with a long space, it’s best to arrange things cross-wise when possible, which visually pushes the walls outward, making the room seem wider.

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How to Fix 4 Common Furniture Mistakes

Instead of one sofa against the longer wall, the space above uses two shorter ones, placed width-wise in the space. This visually pushes the walls outward, a trick that’s repeated with the console table behind the sofa, and the long bookshelf on the far wall.

4. Work with the Middle

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Just because a room is long, doesn’t mean you need to fill it all with furniture. The space above centers the furniture arrangement in the middle, leaving the sides as open, but not dead, space. This works particularly well in a symmetrical room, when the furniture can be centered around a window or fireplace.

5. Utilize an L-Shaped Sofa

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A proper corner sofa, even more so than one with a chaise, can really use the space in a long room well. The room above uses one, and several of the other tips above, to create a usable layout. Notice how the furniture arrangement at the other end of the room (two chairs, a side table and a console) mimic but flip the shape of the sofa, too.

Designing a narrow room with a window: how to choose an interior and furnish it with furniture

Turning a long "pencil case" into a full-fledged living space - a living room, dining room, bedroom, nursery, office or dressing room

A narrow, elongated room is not uncommon in our homes. In addition, in such rooms there is often one window, because of which the lighting of the space suffers. Before you decide how best to deal with the "pencil case", you need accurate measurements.

Polina Anikeeva

3 meters or less?
The width of a narrow room is a critical indicator. If a room is three or more meters across, there are quite a few options for arranging furniture. If it remains in the region of two and a half meters or even less, you will have to get out.

MWAI Architecture and Interiors

Narrow living room
Arranging a living room in a narrow room is perhaps the most difficult task. All family members gather in the living room, so there should be plenty of seating. Your choice - long sofas; it is even desirable that they be longer than usual. Strict lines of perspective will be smoothed out and the room will appear more rectangular. nine0005

The opposite wall can be decorated with shallow hanging shelves or built-in storage. And if the width of the room allows, you can even install a couple of chairs opposite the sofa. It does not matter that they will close the approach to the cabinets - if necessary, the chairs can be easily moved. But such a solution will allow you to conveniently settle down for family communication.

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Make Interiors

It is reasonable to divide not only a narrow, but also a long room into several zones: for communication (armchairs by the window or a desktop), a sofa + TV. Quite often, narrow elongated rooms have an alcove - according to the situation, they have a bed or a built-in wardrobe.

Juliette Byrne

If the length of the room is not enough, you can do without armchairs. Then compact puff tables will serve as an additional place to sit.

You can use a corner sofa to make up for the lack of seating. The lighter the model, the less its visual weight. If the same sofa were in rich, contrasting upholstery in relation to the walls, it would seem gigantic. Consider the visual weight of objects! nine0005

ABOUT THIS…
Question: Why does the interior seem overloaded? The main thing here is that the floor is clearly visible - this creates a feeling of free space.

Bright accents will also help visually adjust the volume of the room. Look at the photo above - thanks to the bright yellow details, the living room seems bright and spacious. nine0005

Interiors By Agostino's

A room with a window near the door can also be converted into a compact area with living room functions. In this case, an alternative to a long sofa is a soft group of chairs and a table. A great option is to furnish such a room with structures in the style of the 50-60s of the last century: visually light, on high wooden legs and with wooden armrests. Complement them with a shallow chest of drawers-credenza, as in the photo.

RELATED PHOTO…
► Narrow living room

COUTURE INTERIORS

Narrow bedroom
If the width of the room is more than 2.6 m, then the double bed can be placed across the room with the headboard against the wall and placed closer to the window. If the width is about 2.3 m, then you will have to forget about a large bed in the bedroom, unless you make it built-in from wall to wall or not be content with a "one and a half" - a narrow double bed 140 cm.

In the case when the bedroom is very small , try to expand the end wall with a headboard with decorative techniques: for example, decorate it with mirrors or wallpaper with an optical effect. nine0005

RELATED PHOTOS…
Narrow Bedroom Design

Interior Marketing Group

There is another way out: to save inches for passage, discard the bed frame, order the heaviest and thickest mattress and put it on a low base as is usually done in hotels.

A thick mattress in a stretch sheet will look like a full bed, but at the same time you will save at least 15 centimeters on the frame of the bed itself. There should be at least 40 cm left for the passage between the wall and objects, preferably 50–55 cm.

Photo on the topic ...
► Design of a small bedroom

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Task: design of a narrow bedroom

Beau Intérieur

If the passage is located between the bed and the wardrobe, then this is the distance big. In this case, it is more convenient to place the bed along the room close to the wall and headboard towards the exit.

As an option, you can make a high headboard combined with shelves. This cabinet will successfully zone the space. On the other side of the closet, you can organize a mini-wardrobe or put a small table for a laptop. nine0005

INT2architecture

It may be successful to have a built-in structure that leaves no passages between the bed and the wall at all. However, this option is more suitable for young people. For older people (they often wake up at night), getting out of the depth of the bed and climbing back will be inconvenient.

aminteriors

Built-in designs offer many options: in a narrow bedroom, you can provide an additional pull-out mattress or a wardrobe in the headboard. nine0005

Turchenko Natalia

In the photo: the bedroom is so narrow that the bed could be placed either across (as in the photo) or with the headboard to the window (the hostess was uncomfortable). The passage was deliberately narrowed - the bed rests against the ledge, which allowed the sofa to be placed from the side of the kitchen (see plan)

AIBD - American Institute of Building Design

Narrow children's bedroom
Reception of a symmetrical arrangement of objects often saves narrow rooms. Especially children's bedrooms for one or two children. Children are usually not embarrassed by the small distance between the beds. Moreover, they are happy about this and will jump from bed to bed with pleasure in the absence of adults. nine0005

Important: If the location of the window allows, it is better to place two beds opposite each other than on top of each other (on the upper floors of loft beds it is usually stuffy).

RELATED PHOTO …
► Narrow children's room for two children

Olga Shangina | Photography

Photo idea: a bed in a narrow bedroom often has to be moved with the long part against the wall. Designers in these cases turn it into an ottoman - a sofa with an orthopedic mattress: we remove the linen and use it like an ordinary sofa

Maria Pilipenko

Narrow cabinet
In cabinets, you can use the same symmetry rule with respect to the window, only for built-in cabinets and surfaces. If both shelves and surfaces are the same width, this will visually balance the room. Yes, perhaps the table would like to be wider, but even this, less than 50 cm wide, is quite enough.

FRUKTOV INTERIORS

If the window is not located in the center of the room, but closer to one of the walls, then it is logical to make insets only on one side, but in this case it will be possible to increase the depth of the working surface. Built-in tables make it easy to bypass load-bearing columns if there are any in the room. nine0005

Clifton Leung Design Workshop - CLDW. com.hk

In rooms where the width varies from window to door due to load-bearing structures, several workstations can be marked out: one along the window, the other along the wall. A very useful thing if there are two people actively working from home in the family and it is inconvenient for them to share one table.

Yana Ivanchenko

Narrow dining room
Oddly enough, but a narrow room with one window may well be a dining room if the kitchen and cooking area are nearby. The main thing here is to choose the right table. If you need a non-standard narrow version, you can look for ready-made tabletops for desks (they are already dining tables) and complement them with designer legs. Or make a table to order. nine0005

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6 tips for designing a long narrow room + photo

Natalia | 03. 11.2017 | Updated | Interior design | 41,763 views | No comments

Contents of the article

Wagon, pencil case, tunnel - as soon as long narrow rooms are not called. Unfortunately, they are frequent guests in domestic apartments. If the problem cannot be solved by redevelopment and demolition of the wall, then you will have to act more cunningly. Small narrow and long rooms are a challenge for many experienced designers, let alone ordinary people! But do not despair - the right choice of colors, proper placement of furniture and a few win-win tricks will help organize a retracted room and even bring its shape closer to a perfect square. So, the design of a long narrow room: what can be done and what should never be done? nine0005

#1. Color scheme and finishing

The main friend of all small and non-standard rooms is light shades. If white is not to your liking, you can use light gray, beige and light shades of other colors. Dark and bright colors can only be used in small quantities.

The most effective method of is to paint long walls in light colors, thereby pushing them apart, and highlight short walls with a more saturated color, bringing them closer to each other. Two shades can be both in common tonality and contrasting. The ceiling is also desirable to make light, like the floor. nine0005

To make the interior not seem boring, you can use bright color accents : paintings, vases, textiles, small pieces of furniture of prominent colors will attract attention and distract the visitor from the true geometry of the room. At least that's what the designers say, backing up this fact with psychology.

Flooring elements are best laid parallel to short walls or even diagonally. Thus, the space of the room can be made visually a little wider. nine0005

One of the long walls can be finished with Perspective Wall Murals . Suitable for urban and natural landscapes. This solution can be recognized as ingenious and universal, since due to the perspective the room expands significantly, and due to other methods, it is possible to completely turn the trailer into a harmonious room of the correct form.

mirrors cope well with room correction. By placing a large mirror on a long wall, you can also achieve the effect of expanding space. It is important not to overdo it, and not to use photo wallpaper and a large mirror in the same room. An interesting solution is to use mirror inserts along the top or bottom edge of the wall, making the partitions airy and creating the illusion that the room is actually much larger than it is. In addition, mirrors perfectly reflect light, making the room more lit, which is very important in our case. nine0005

Some designers advise to use horizontal stripes in the decoration of one of the short walls , which will partially “run into” the adjacent long wall.

#2. Proper zoning

Another effective technique in the design of a long narrow room is the zoning and allocation of two functional centers in one room. The main thing is not to use bulky cabinets and solid massive partitions to divide the space.

For zoning an elongated room, you can use:

  • carpet in contrasting color to the flooring. In this case, all corners of the room will be quietly illuminated by sunlight, but at the same time, the living area, for example, will be clearly separated from the working area with a desk;
  • platform can be used to place a bed or work station on it. The space under the podium can be used to organize storage. It is important to choose the optimal height of the "pedestal" so that, when entering it, you do not bang your head against the ceiling. Additional separation can be obtained due to the different colors of the walls; nine0221
  • small sofa placed across the room . Most of the area will turn into a regular square-shaped living room, and a smaller one can be used as an office;
  • shelving unit with open through shelves works in the same way as the sofa. The main thing is that it should be airy and not block the light;
  • mobile partitions, screens and curtains are suitable when in a narrow long room it is necessary to allocate a place for sleeping and receiving guests, for example. nine0221

#3. Proper lighting

A well-lit room appears more spacious than a similarly dark one. In a tram room, it is better to highlight every corner and make the most of sunlight , so light compact curtains are chosen to frame the window. Roman and roller blinds, blinds are perfect, which make it easy to open the entire window opening completely, and, if desired, protect yourself from street light. If necessary, you can complement the window with a delicate translucent tulle. nine0005

In artificial lighting , it is better to provide several levels: a chandelier for general light, spotlights, floor lamps and sconces for highlighting individual areas, as well as an LED strip for creating decorative lighting.

No. 4. Arrangement of furniture in a long narrow room

This is the most difficult issue in the design of pencil cases. On the one hand, I want to fit all the required pieces of furniture in order to ensure a comfortable life. On the other hand, if you sideways and zigzags your way from the door to the window, then there is no question of any convenience. nine0005

The most effective techniques that designers use when arranging furniture in long narrow rooms:

  • positioning the sofa against a short wall;
  • grouping furniture in one part of the room, leaving the rest more spacious;
  • instead of one large sofa, it is sometimes appropriate to use several armchairs, which form a cozy living room group;
  • it is extremely undesirable to place absolutely all pieces of furniture along long walls - we risk getting a semblance of a railway car, so a small sofa and an armchair set at an angle to it are better than one long sofa; nine0221
  • at least part of the furniture must be perpendicular to long walls ;
  • leave long walls as free as possible, use of open shelves is allowed;
  • wardrobe is best placed against a short wall. So we acquire a storage place, and bring the room closer to the shape of a square.

#5. What other tricks can be used?

There are a number of ways to change the perception of space and give a long room a more regular shape:

  • To make the room visually a little shorter, a barrier located almost at the far short wall will help. A screen, a bench, a small table, etc. can act in its role;
  • the use of round objects allows you to visually smooth the corners and get rid of the tunnel effect;
  • If possible, small niches can be created in the walls. The difference in the depth of the walls will make the interior more dynamic. For this purpose, rough textures are also used, such as decorative stone and brick; nine0221
  • works well in long rooms asymmetry so feel free to experiment;
  • the number of pieces of solid furniture is best kept to a minimum. The best option is furniture that is capable of transformation, or one that is easy to move;
  • Carpets with stripes running parallel to short walls are a great way to open up a space. Rows of lamps located perpendicular to long walls have a similar effect.

#6. Features of different rooms

The rules described above are equally valid for all long and narrow spaces, but still, when arranging different rooms (living room, bedroom, etc.), it is worth taking into account some nuances.

Narrow and long living room

The living room is usually the largest room in the apartment, because it is a gathering place for all household members and guests. If only a long narrow room remains at your disposal, then it will not be easy. It will be doubly difficult if the room is small in size. nine0005

If the living room has a decent length, then it is best to equip several zones . One will have a sofa with a TV and other attributes of the living room, the other will have a dining room, a work desk, or a play area for children.

If the living room is shaped like a pencil case, and at the same time small, then you may have to abandon the traditional large sofa. It can be replaced with a couple of compact sofas or a few armchairs. They must be placed in different planes: parallel and perpendicular to the long wall. Light coffee tables and multifunctional furniture will come to the rescue. Storage places are organized on open shelves and in a small console, which can also act as a TV stand. nine0005

Narrow long bedroom

A bedroom is indispensable without a bed, so its location is considered in the first place. It all depends on the size of the room and the bed itself. The standard length is 1.9-2 m. The width of a single bed is about 90 cm, a single bed is up to 140 cm, a double bed is 160-170 cm. sides, preferably 70 cm.

A single bed is usually not a problem. If you want to put a bigger bed, you will have to carefully calculate everything. It is best to put it with a headboard against a long wall, but another option is allowed. In extreme cases, you can move the bed with one side to the wall. nine0005

If the bedroom is very elongated, then you can give part of it to create a dressing room. The remaining space on the opposite side can be used to install a work or dressing table.

Long and narrow kitchen

A long kitchen is the hardest thing to do. As a rule, a linear layout is used and the installation of all kitchen furniture and appliances along one wall. It's great if you can use a short wall with a window and install an L-shaped kitchen. In this case, the geometry of space will be partially saved. nine0005

Only part of a long wall can be used as a kitchen unit. The remaining space against the short wall can serve as a dining area. This is a good enough solution. You can also advise using translucent chairs.

If the kitchen is small, then it makes sense to move the dining area to the next room, but if this is not possible, then compact bar counters and folding tables will come to the rescue.

Finally, we note that it is worth considering the design of the pencil case room in advance, and during repairs, act with extreme caution so as not to steal usable space, so it is better to refuse drywall as a means of leveling walls if possible.

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