Living Room Layouts for Conversation and TV: 6 Tips

It can be tricky to get a living room arranged in a way that meets both your TV watching needs and your entertaining and social needs. You want it to be comfortable enough to relax and watch TV, but you also want it to be a place where it’s easy to make conversation. Every living room has to wear two hats.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to arrange your living room in a way that meets both needs. Included are a few real examples from living rooms that are a little tricky to figure out.

Functional Living Room Layouts

First things first, you need to plot out your living room on a piece of paper. This only takes 10 minutes to do. You just need to measure the length and width of your room. You can use an electronic tool or a tape measure. You want to mark out where the doors and windows are located, so that you can know the travel paths. This will help you figure out how to make your furniture feel balanced in the space.

An easy way to do this on paper is with graph paper because a lot of graph paper has quarter inch boxes. Each foot of your living room is a quarter inch. You can use a free app like Floor Planner. Know that there is a little bit of a learning curve.

If you decide you want to do it on paper, I have a furniture template. All you have to do is cut out the right size sofa, rug, and chairs for your space. You just slide it around on your piece of paper. It makes floor planning easy to see on paper. Get the furniture template here.

Step 1: Place the Largest Piece First

The first thing you need to do when you’re placing your furniture is pick the biggest piece, which is usually the couch. Figure out the best place for that.

One of the things you need to think about when you’re placing your couch is, do I want to sit on the couch and watch TV? The ideal viewing distance from the couch to the TV is 10 to 12 feet. You need to figure out where you’re going to put your TV and where you’re going to put your couch if that’s a purpose that your living room serves.

If you have another room that you do all your TV watching in, then you don’t need to consider that at all. You can center your space around conversation.

If you do watch TV, keep in mind that 10 to 12 feet distance. If you put your couch too far away because of the layout of the room, then you really can’t see the TV well. Or, if you put the TV too high on the wall above fireplace, sometimes it can make watching TV uncomfortable.

Step 2. Pull Furniture Away From the Walls

One way to make your space feel like it’s set up for conversation is to pull the furniture away from the walls. It’s almost like being in the principal’s office if you line all of your furniture up against the walls. You want to pull things into the room, even if it’s just a few inches away from the wall. It’ll make the space feel a lot more cozy.

Step 3. Get Pieces That Are Movable

The next tip is that you should add pieces of furniture that can move around in the space. If you have a really small space, this is a good way to use swivel chairs or small armchairs. If you have pieces that you can move around, it’s a little bit easier to make the space feel more conversational, even if you don’t use it that way on a daily basis.

If you have a tight space and you need a travel path most of the time, if you have movable pieces, you can put those inside the travel path while you’re entertaining.

Step 4. Use Rugs to Define Spaces

Another tip is to use rugs to define the areas in your living room. This is helpful in a bigger space or in a space that’s going to have either two seating areas or a seating area and a dining area. If you’re looking for tips on how to find the right size rug, I’ve done a separate post about finding the right size of rug. You want to make sure that all your furniture has at least the front legs on the rug.

Step 5. Add Lighting

The next tip is to make sure that your room has enough lighting. Most of the time, overhead lights are not enough to light the whole room. To make your space feel more cozy use lamps and sconces, lights above your art, and above the cabinets, Add at least two or three additional sources of light to the ceiling light, and that makes the space feel a lot more cozy. To learn more about light sources, see my post about lighting every room.

Step 6. Use a Coffee Table

Put something in the middle of your seating area. Try a padded ottoman or a coffee table. This serves as a focal point. Unless you have a minimal kind of aesthetic, it helps with conversation if you put something in the middle of the seating area. You ideally want that to be about 2/3 as wide as your couch.

If you’re working on your living room arrangement and you’re in the market for a sofa, be sure you check out my post on how to find the right size sofa for your space in my sofa buying guide.

Two Examples of Living Room Layouts

Let’s look at two examples so you can see how important it is to do floor planning. The first one is sort of a small living dining area and it’s long and narrow. It’s tricky to get a television into the space without putting it on top of the fireplace.

Once you attempt the floor planning, you can see if we move the sofa around it creates a travel path to get up the stairs. Here there are limited options for how big a sofa can be, but we wouldn’t know that if we didn’t plot it all out on a piece of paper.

In this second living room, in the original setup, the sofa was way too far away from the TV to be able to see it. In fact, they didn’t use the sofa to watch TV and they sat in the chairs. Their complaint was that the space didn’t feel very good for conversation.