You’ve got yourself a lovely fresh empty room, now you’ve got to fill it with stuff…but what stuff? Well sometimes that’s an easy question to answer. Most people would agree a bedroom needs a bed, a living room needs a sofa and a dining room needs a table to, well…dine on. So far so good. But what about wardrobe vs. drawers, desk vs. vanity, bench vs. chair or coffee vs. side table. So many more and less easy to answer questions arise. How big should the stuff be? Where does all the stuff go? How much stuff is too much stuff?
Getting confused? Stuff that! We’ve come up with some helpful pointers to make the whole furnishing process a bit less stressful.
Consider the lifestyle of the tenants
A good way to start is to think about who is going to end up living in the property. Different types of tenants will use the space differently. If you think your tenants are going to be more interested in watching TV than having conversations with each other, this will affect the layout of your living room. Or it might be that your tenants are working from home a lot and going out to eat, impacting what you do in the dining space.
Having a clear picture of who your target market is will really help with creating your furniture layouts and what elements you need to include or exclude and what your focal points are going to be.
Zoning
Now you have a good idea of what’s going to be going on in your property, you’ll be able to think about what areas are for what purpose. Write out a big list of activities that your prospective tenants will be doing. This can be as obvious as sleep, eat, cook, study and right up to the obscure…growing micro herbs, painting portraits, Karaoke?
Start to assign the functions to different areas of your property, this will start out really easy - cook in the kitchen, sleep in the bedroom and so on. But as you allocate more activities you start to have to think really hard about use of space, you might have to cut activities or create dual use areas. You can draw little bubbles for each activity on your floorplan if it helps you visualise.
Congratulations, you’re now a master of zoning!
Flow
Interior Designers will talk about flow as if everyone knows exactly what they’re talking about. I certainly didn’t when I first heard the term, but it’s pretty simple really.
So what is flow? How things move around the space from one area to another. The “moving” can be physical or aesthetic.
In terms of physically getting around, is it easy to go from the kitchen to the dining room holding plates or are you jumping over a coffee table and swerving 3 sofas to serve dinner? Can you get from the bed to the ensuite without tripping over a desk lamp cable or stubbing your toe on a chest of drawers? You can create good physical flow by using floor planning tools such as HomeByMe, Floorplanner and FoyrNeo to lay out all your rooms and furniture, then imagine yourself living a day in your space. If you bump into anything, maybe think again.
The aesthetic flow is a bit tricker, but still achievable! It’s just how the look and feel of a property continues between rooms. For example, you might feel that a very modern sleek kitchen next to a bright maximalist dining room is a bit jarring and both rooms will feel a bit out of place. Styles should flow from one room to another. Now, I’m not saying you have to use the exact same furniture package through the property, but pairing complementing pieces will make the rooms feel connected much better than a super sleek modern chair in one room and a shabby chic table in another.
You can achieve this kind of cohesive design across your whole property by utilising mood boards. These can be done on Canva, Pinterest boards or even a word processor, just do one to find your overall style by pulling in general things you like, and then carry that through for each room. Remember to keep on referring back to your overall style board often, so you don’t stray too far from your core style.
We've created a guide to help you create amazing moodboards, you can purchase it here.
Balance
I think a lot of people when they hear “balance” in interiors their brain jumps to those very formal rooms with a mirror above a fireplace, a coffee table down the middle with two books and a bowl in the centre and two of the exact same sofa pointing at each other. Now that is balanced because its perfectly symmetrical, and it looks great for a photo, but not really ideal for a HMO or a couple on holiday in your SA wanting to watch a movie and relax. You can achieve balance without having to resort to symmetry.
Think of a pair of old school scales, you put weights on each side. Symmetry is putting a pineapple on each side, they weigh the same so no issue. What we can also do is put an apple, a pear, one banana and as many grapes as it takes to level out. We’re now balanced without being a mirror image. Think of the pineapple as a wardrobe on one side of a bedroom wall, and the apple, pear and banana as a desk/vanity, stool, and shelves. Finally, those grapes are your vases, bowls, picture frames and books to get to the perfect visual weight to balance out the wardrobe. You can take this fruity concept and apply it to any room in your project.
Clearances
The last thing you want is for you to spend loads of time and effort working out the perfect balance and flow for your project and then when the build is complete, you can’t actually roll the desk chair out because the bed’s in the way. Or the sofa is too far away from the coffee table to put down your mug, and you have to get up from the comfort of those cushions, no thank you!
Checking the clearances of different furniture layouts is essential to the final product being its best. The classics are, reaching for things and them being too far away, things that should move can’t move because there’s something in the way and things that should open can’t without having to rearrange the furniture. So as always, keep the person who’s going to be living there in mind, visualise how they will use the space and it’s much, much easier to move a three seater sofa on paper than lugging it around a living room in a panic.
Lighting
A last little extra is lighting. I know you've already got loads to think about with the layouts but whether it’s natural or artificial, consider where it will (or maybe won’t) be. For example try to keep desks in natural light, centre your dining table under a light for winter dinners and utilise dark basements for cinema rooms.
We'd love to see your planning process and furniture layouts over on our instagram.
