DECORATING BASICS
How To Plan Your Space

by Sheran James

How well do you know your room? In order to shape and dress it, you need to know and understand your room as well as you know yourself. Go to the room you need to organize or rearrange and ask yourself these questions:

Q: What are the dimensions of your room, and what is its basic shape?  Is it square, rectangular, L-shaped?

Q: What is your room's inherent nature? If it were a person, would it be Queen Victoria – voluptuous, majestic, overstuffed? Would it be slim and elegant Audrey Hepburn? PeeWee Herman? Austin Powers? James Bond? Cher?

Q: What are your room's problems? Does it have a ceiling that's too low? Is it overly long and narrow? Does it lack any distinguishing points? Does it have a focal point that's off-centre?

Q: What are your room's assets? Does it have beautiful mouldings, a picture window, an elegant fireplace?

 Using Floor Plans
The best way to understand your room's shape – with all its intractable ins and outs – is to draw a floor plan. Draw one now, allotting 1/4" to each linear foot that forms the baseline of your walls.

Draw around each side of anything that's permanently attached to your wall (a radiator, a pillar, a fireplace surround). Draw behind any moveable piece of furniture – because if you can move it, you may want to when you rearrange your room. Mark the width of the gap forming any doorway, whether it's a major doorway or a doorway to a closet. And even though your windows aren't at the base of your floors, mark where they start and end. That way, when you go to use your floor plan to try out different furniture arrangements, you'll know where not to place that highboy.

Now, using lengths and widths only, make yourself simple cut-outs of your anticipated furniture pieces in the same 1/4" = 1'0" scale.  

Your floor plan can help you visualize where to place furniture, how many furniture pieces will fit into your room and where the traffic paths need to be. But it won't reveal other key details, such as your room's personality and the height of its walls.

The clues to your room's true nature lie in its architecture. Do you see thick, ornate Victorian mouldings around the top of your walls and windows? Then your furniture should have equally weighty materials and carvings. Does your room have a curved wall or mantel, or a prominent bow window? Then a round or semi-circular piece of furniture, or a round or semi-circular furniture arrangement could complement it. If your room is a blank slate architecturally, you may want to add visual dimension via panelling, stencilling, a chair rail, a series of French doors or a Dutch door.

Overcoming a room's weaknesses
If your room has low ceilings, keep your furniture lines low. Choose sofas and chairs with low backs, unless you're an unusually tall person. For personal comfort, seatback height should be closer to your shoulders than to your waist. Keep cabinetry heights below eye level, or let your cabinetry stretch all the way to the ceiling – you don't want to inadvertently produce an even lower visual height cap for your walls. Avoid using cornices over the windows of a low-ceilinged room for the same reason.

You can raise your walls' visual height by hanging pictures, plates or a shelf full of objects over your windows and doors. You can make your walls seem taller by painting them and any cornice moulding into the ceiling. Use the same colour as the ceiling to minimize the wall/ceiling delineation. Use light, satiny, cool colours, since they make space recede.

Warm, dark, matte colours advance space. Use them if you want to make your room feel smaller and cosier (avoid them if you don't). In a room that's overly long and narrow, you can use warm colours on the shorter walls to pull them forward and make the room feel squarer.

If your room has an awkward shape, or a lot of built-in obstructions, or an off-centre focal point, use your furniture arrangements to visually divide your room into a series of more manageable "mini-rooms" within the room. Create a clustered seating arrangement in one area of the room, say, around a fireplace (remember, you don't have to place all your furniture against the walls). Create a separate arrangement – a grouping of plants, a chaise, a desk or a piano – in another area of the room to balance it. Use area rugs to enhance definition.

If your room has a particularly attractive feature, such as a fireplace or picture window, let it be what the eye goes to first by making it the most colourful or elegant feature in the room and/or cantering your furniture arrangement around it.