Interior designer Rita Konig on how to lay out your room | The house have a garden

The layout's your building block and you will find that it's sort of, it's not quite painting by numbers, but you're building a frame and then you will fill it in and so it will become much easier when you start here. There are a few things, like very large rooms are quite difficult and they're very daunting to be faced with, a sort of barn conversion room or any very large room and the key is not necessarily to start buying bigger furniture, which is something that one sees quite often in big rooms, but I would take those rooms and divide them, so a very long room you can divide into three, so you can have a central seating area and then you can have two other areas either end, so that might be dining or it might be separate seating or it might be a library bit or a television watching area at one end, but you can on your plan divide them up, that will make it much easier for you because it's easier to do the furniture layout in a smaller space. In a regular size room I think the key is to start in the middle, I always try and start in the middle rather than let the furniture sit on the outside of a room, bring the furniture in and then you can lay your furniture. One of the nicest things in a room is to when you're sitting down to see furniture beyond furniture and that leads your eye, it makes a room feel much larger, it doesn't make a room feel larger to sit on the outside looking into a enormous space in the middle. I think the most important thing with layout and this is the moment to really sort of dig deep into this, is it's the moment to think very carefully about how you live in your house, what your house needs to deliver for the way that you live and there are two things here, one is to be very realistic and truthful with yourself about your lifestyle, but also to remember that if you're living with a young family or you're embarking on a marriage or if you're coming out of a marriage or whatever's going on, all these parts of life are transient, so three-year-olds turn into ten-year-olds quite quickly. Three-year-olds while you're building a house might easily be five or six-year-olds by the time you move into the house, so don't decorate for three-year-old, but don't create a drawing room for fabulous weekend house parties if you're living in a house in London with an open plan kitchen, dining, sitting room with a whole load of toys in it because that doesn't fit into your life, but I think what you do want to do in that case is make sure that while there's a lot of plastic and balls and toys on the floor in the daytime, come six, seven, eight o'clock when those children get cleared away, so do the toys and you can actually sit down have a grown-up conversation without tripping over a toy that's going to start squeaking and making a tune for the next five minutes. So once you've got there and you've started to look at your room layout, you want to take the furniture that you have and start placing it, so it may be that you have a sofa or you don't have a sofa or you've got a sofa that's fine but you'd like a better one in your sitting room, so the sofa you had before maybe ends up in a TV room if you've got two sitting rooms or you decide to get rid of that sofa and you're going to upgrade it or you're going to use that sofa for now and maybe upgrade it later. Whatever it is, take all your furniture and start placing it. Don't rush to get rid of too much stuff because when you're embarking on a new house you'll be amazed by how much furniture a room takes. I mean there's really so much stuff that a house inhales that it's unlikely that you're going to have too much stuff at the end and if you do you can then lose the stuff that you might have wanted to get rid of at the beginning but you know an ugly table can be jolly useful and it's much better to have that ugly table than to have no table because no table and no light and nowhere to put your drink whereas ugly table is still useful. One of the ways to layer a room is to put a table behind a sofa. It's very nice to think of maybe putting a desk behind a sofa in a drawing room. It also means that if you've got a more formal drawing room the desk behind a sofa will take you into that room. It's really nice to think that that you might be in that room every day. It will do a lot for the atmosphere of that room rather than let it become a room that's used at Christmas and birthdays type of space and it's usually quite peaceful and it's almost always the best room in the house that's given over to that. It's also a good place to put a drinks tray and a lamp or stacks of books or whatever. The other thing with those sofa tables is use any table. Don't get your measuring tape out too much and get a console that's the right height for the back of the sofa. It doesn't matter if the table's lower, it doesn't matter if it's a bit taller, it can be a long, it can be just a regular quite big table depending on the size of the room, the space you've got behind. You may not have space to put the table behind the sofa but want to put it against the wall behind the sofa which is something I've done before. It may be that you don't have space to bring the sofa off the wall and you have to have a sofa on the wall so you must be led by the room rather than led by a rule. There isn't a rule that you should have a sofa in the middle of the room with a table behind it. There's a rule that you should look at the room see what fits, that's the most important thing. If we're talking really about drawing rooms and sitting rooms at the moment there is there's a one obvious key thing you're looking for is how many people you can seat. So I will go and count how many seats I've got whether that's on a fender, an ottoman, a couple of sofas and the chairs. I'll do a quick count of how many can sit versus how many people can sleep in the house and how many people can eat in the house because obviously it's important if you've got a house that sleeps 14 that you can seat more than eight people in the drawing room otherwise it becomes uncomfortable and that's the same with your dining you've got to be able to seat the right the same amount of people as you can sleep really. Flow is important and also think when you're when you're seating your people in the room think how comfortable it is for them to talk to one another. Use fireplaces also you may not have space for a fender stool but you might be able to just slip a little stool in or a slipper chair by the fireplace which is a very nice place to seat because you've suddenly got people looking back into the room rather than everybody gathered in a u-shape around the fireplace. Fireplaces also can be hindrances in rooms they're not always in the right place sometimes they're off center sometimes they're at the end of a long room which means do you have all your seating at the end of the room around the fireplace and then you've got all this room left with nothing in it. It's quite a common problem to find that the fireplace is giving you grief in terms of working out your seating so when that happens what I tend to do is ignore the do the seating plan and furniture layout that works as if there wasn't a fireplace and then sort of reveal the fireplace and see how it works but you don't need to sit around a fireplace for the fire in the room to add an enormous amount in terms of atmosphere and warmth you know the seating can still be in the center of the room and you can have a fireplace at the end of the room with two seats two chairs on either side or a fender stool or something so don't be governed by those sorts of architectural details don't be governed by a beautiful view out the window and feel like all the chairs have got to be facing it you will take in those things in the room without staring at them you very rarely look at things to appreciate them just being there is is enough the best way to start really is to have some tracing paper these rolls you can order them on amazon they're what architects use which are quite they're quite satisfying so you just roll them out and then break break off however much you need so there you can use as little or as much as you want tape it down with some masking tape so far so pretty good and it's a good idea to just mark the corner of the room so that when you take the paper off and you put it back you've got the you're in the right place so this room is a little study and it's one of the very few rooms in this house that has a television so what we need to do is put in quite a you know a really comfortable sofa this is a scale rule so your plans will be will be drawn to scale by the architects and if you're in the states that will be in inches and if you're here it'll be in centimeters so this is a quarter of an inch is the scale so i need to measure see what i can fit and i think i can fit in here sort of comfortably maybe i can get a seven foot sofa sofa there we go and then if we can it'll be huge let's see if it fits a four foot so that's a really slouching it may be that we have to pull that back a little bit because if we want to get a desk in so i think we're going to have to really have a three foot which is still comfortable just over three foot sofa so i'm going to bring that back so this is why this is important because you can get quite quickly quite a clear idea and maybe in this room we don't have an enormous ottoman but something a bit shallower and then i'd like to put some bookcases in the corner here probably with a little drawer that pulls out so there's somewhere i'm a pull-out shelf so there's somewhere to put your drink and then here i'll put a nice juicy armchair that can spin around so then the pencil tends to rub off so it all looks a bit better if you've got if it's in pencil if it's drawn over in ink because you can see it more easily and then i would say here deep and then what details i've got there and those are standalone built in and that is a pull and i think what might be quite nice there if we can fit it is some little sort of slipper chair that could actually probably come a bit shorter now i need another color they've sort of messed that up slightly but not to give someone a chair here and then you start to have a look at things like that dimension so that's about two foot it's quite useful it's quite useful to have a tape measure just to you know that's fine to get in there that distance and what is that so that's about three foot and that's 18 inches so that's all right in here for that to be quite close and that is two and a half feet so if that is 24 so that's not very much room ideally that should be three foot because you're going to want to bring a chair around without feeling squashed so it may be i've got to think about one of these things has got to go probably maybe that armchair and keep it keep that as the more comfortable thing and make that a bit shorter which might be nicer because what makes the room really uncomfortable is if there's if you're climbing over things and pushing things out the way and you just don't have space so i think we lose that armchair make the desk more comfortable even maybe have that chair over there there instead and not there so i suppose this is when you're really relieved that you did it on tracing paper and not straight onto your plans so then to start again or you pull them off and put them in your folder with the um with the room that you start to design so you've got the rooms together so this is it completed and from here this is where i then will start doing the fabrics so that takes us here and there is sofa fabric sofa cushion that's another sofa cushion and i think i'll also do that chair in that fabric which i think will be very pretty um ottoman in that and maybe a lampshade or something in that i'm not sure about this yet so for example that is a chair that i think we should wait on for now and see when we're in the house if we want it so you don't have to that room will still function with only one armchair and then we'll find something later it's also quite nice that might be a vintage armchair that's upholstered in a really lovely old leather or something that's comfortable to sit in but could also be a desk chair like an old you know wicker seat with the seat and back cushions so it's good to leave some gaps and especially because they're gaps that you're not covering with an upholstery fabric which i also like you know it might end up being something found which is good otherwise it all can end up looking a bit like a furniture showroom the other thing when you do this by the way when you choose your fabrics and you sit going yep that's on that that's on that that's all lovely you must label them because well i find that one then goes back to me forgotten completely what was going on and we put them in these plastic bags with the name of the rum on it