How to Arrange Furniture Around an Angled Fireplace

Make a to-scale floor plan of the room. Use one-quarter-inch graph paper with a scale of one square to every 6 inches of floor. The more accurate you are with your measurements, the more successful you will be with the finished plan. The plan will allow you to determine if the existing furniture can be placed correctly, how to change the furniture placement if necessary and what size new furniture should be. Indicate door and window placements, and any heat registers or radiators. Indicate the position of the fireplace, including the hearth.

Measure the width, from side to side and depth, from the back to the front, of all the furniture to be used in the room. Make to-scale cut-outs of these pieces from the graph paper and label each one.

Draw a rectangle or square in front of the fireplace on the floor plan to suggest the furniture placement area, keeping the lines of the rectangle or square straight and lined up with the line of the front edge of the hearth. If the available space is longer than it is wide, the rectangle will be the shape; if the space is more equal on all sides, the shape will be square. From a bird's-eye view looking down at the floorplan, you should see a fireplace anchoring a square or rectangle within the shape of the room.

Place the furniture pieces on the floor plan. Place the most important piece of furniture first and orient it toward the focal point. For example, place the front of the sofa parallel to the front of the fireplace. Position the sofa the necessary distance from the fireplace to accommodate a coffee table if you own one. Keep the furniture straight to the lines of the drawn rectangle. The piece may sit on, inside, or outside the line, but it must be straight.

Place the next most important pieces of furniture on the floor plan. In a typical living room, this would be the side chairs. Position them straight to the rectangle drawn on the floor plan.
For example, the side chairs may be placed one to each side of the sofa, oriented toward each other.

Position the next most important pieces following the same guidelines. These pieces will usually be the coffee and end tables. Keep these pieces straight to the rectangle.

Place furniture around the perimeter of the room as required, straight to the lines of the walls.