One Room - Two Purposes

1 Room – 2 Purposes

I am going to start off this Blog with an issue that we recently came across with one of our Design Consultation customers. This couple lives in Grant Park in what is known as a Folk Victorian built sometime in the 1920’s. It is your typical Grant Park home with a central hallway running from front to back with rooms on each side of the hallway. The Living Room measures approximately 14’ x 15’ with a fireplace on one wall. The couple has one child and one on the way.

The room is used as a family room to watch TV, do homework, craft projects and to play video games with their child and soon to be children. The room is also used regularly for entertaining friends and neighbors. This is a common issue within our community with older homes where one room has to serve dual purposes: providing the comfort for family time combined with style and room for entertaining adults.

When putting together room plans we first considered sectionals as an option for seating. We could either use a sectional that was sofa/chaise or one that was sofa/sofa. Both options fit the room physically. The sectionals would definitely give comfort for family time and a place to curl up and watch movies however when it came to entertaining adults the sectionals fell short in providing the necessary seating.

Let me interject here….in the furniture world upholstery items have a system that counts the number of seats for different items. A sofa is considered 3 seats. A love seat is 2 seats and a chair is 1 seat. A common mistake that many people make is to immediately think that a sectional is going to give them the most seating. A sofa/chaise combination is only going to give 4 seats for guests and most guests are not going to stretch out on the chaise. A sofa/chaise works great for family rooms but is not a good solution for every day entertaining. A sofa/sofa combination while it may be 6 seats physically, you actually loose the corner seat in when entertaining unless you have guests who like to curl up in the corner with their legs crossed. That means in counting functional seats a sofa/sofa combination only gives you 5 seats.

Since neither of these options worked to provide the necessary seating we next turned to an option few actually consider which was to use 2 sofas. Using 2 sofas each having 3 seats gave us 6 seats which was more than we would get using a sectional. Not only did we get the necessary seating we also were able to put an End Table in the corner giving us a place for a lamp and for guest to sit a drink.

Some of you may be thinking “but I do not have room for 2 sofas”. The math ended up looking like this: each sofa measured 79” + room for an End Table (average being 24”) = 103” total in each direction which was less than the long side of either the sofa/sofa or the sofa/chaise combinations which was 110”. To put the icing on the cake my customers being on the ball and thinking ahead decided to make one of the sofa’s a sleeper sofa which gain them room for over night guest.

Welcome to the Traders Design Forum!

We created this Blog as a way for you to get answers to your interior design questions. At TRADERS we offer In-Home Design Consultations and this Blog is just an extension of that service. We know that the decisions about what sofa to buy or what color to paint a room can be stressful; but fear no more. We are here to help ease some of the stress. We do not claim to know all the answers but together we will come up with a plan for your home.