Choosing The Right Sofa

Written by

Inspired Spaces

11 November 2021

 • 

3 min read

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Choosing the right sofa for your living area can be abit overwhelming with the never-ending choices available to us today. And at the end of the day, aesthetics have to meet function.

Your living room is one of the most important spaces in your home as it’s the main area where your family and guests will spend time together relaxing.

It is essential to create a room that is welcoming and spacious, while being functional and able to hold up to daily wear and tear.

Here are a few tips to help make your decision a little easier.

Size Matters

It is important to firstly think of the space that you have available and what sized sofa would be best suited to that area. If you are replacing an old sofa, you can measure this to give you an idea of what size you will need.

Choosing The Right Sofa

Larger lounge rooms can hold big modular sofas, or 2 matching sofa’s for example. They will fill the space well and also provide a lot of seating.

A smaller couch with legs may be more suited to a small living area, as the legs will give the illusion of space. You can pair this with a nice occasional chair to provide extra seating.

Functionality

This will also help you work out the layout of the space.

Think about whether your room will be for relaxing in front of the tv and winding down at the end of the day? If so, you will need to make sure that your sofa is facing the direction towards the television.

Or maybe you would like your lounge room to be more for social interaction with family and friends? Having a sofa opposite or adjacent to a couple of occasional chairs will provide a good social environment.

An easy way to work out furniture placement is to measure your room and draw it up on graph paper to scale. Then you can draw up your furniture (also to scale) and play around with the layout.

To take it a step further, you can tape out the furniture on the floor with some masking tape.

Choosing The Right Sofa

Sit on it!

Ben Konfrst

Next step is to hit the showrooms.  Online shopping for a sofa, in my opinion, is a no-no! You don’t want to have it delivered, only to find when you sit on it you bounce right back off instead of being comfortably hugged as you were hoping.

So when in the showroom, make sure you sit and lie down on the sofa as you would at home. You really want to get a feel for how it will work for you.

Fabric

Plush, soft coloured linens look beautiful, but aren’t practical if you have a young family and pets.  Neither is a suede or soft cotton fabric.  They are not very forgiving with stains and spills.

Leather is great for easy cleaning and generally wears well, but this may not be the look that you are after and will also take some maintenance.

A ‘Scotch-guarded’ textured fabric is a good choice for a family home, as it can hide general wear and tear very well.

Textured fabric hides wear & tear while leather is easy to clean

For more sofa and living room tips, click here: http://www.inspiredspaces.com.au/6-steps-to-styling-your-living-room/