Size matters in furniture and feng shui

Scale is important in design and feng shui. In feng shui, everything is about balance. Your furnishings should be sized for the space they are in. If you have a living with triple high ceilings and lots of space that isn’t the room for Victorian furnishings. Or if you have a small cozy room, that isn’t the space for large oversized furniture. How many times have you seen a huge sofa in a regular to small living room? It doesn’t look right does it?

 

With the advent of bigger homes and bigger rooms, sofas and chairs have all gotten significantly larger. When faced with a large room, it’s better to divide the room into sections instead of purchasing gigantic, oversized furniture. Extremely oversized furniture limits your room use options and often winds up being placed along the walls – something that doesn’t encourage or welcome people into the room. In fact, arranging furniture in this manner turns the room into a hallway, moving people through it rather than into it.

 

When you divide the room into separate sections, each section should have a clear purpose. For example: a sitting area, a reading area and a desk/study area. Using a room in this manner creates cozy nooks and intimate seating areas. People are instinctively drawn to smaller, intimate spaces – spaces that embrace them with a sense of comfort and security. When our spaces and furnishings are oversized our sense of comfort is overpowered and we are left feeling exposed and uncomfortable.

 

And if that isn’t enough discouragement, when you move you may find that your oversize furniture dominates your new home, making it difficult to arrange your furnishings in a way that creates warm and welcoming rooms.

 

When choosing your furnishings, make selections that are both comfortable and moderately sized. These choices will provide you with more options, you’ll be able to rearrange your rooms and move your furnishings around, mixing up where they are situated and what they are arranged with.

 

Home furnishings aren’t meant to be wildly disproportionate to the rooms they are in, they aren’t meant to dwarf us. Our sofas and chairs are meant to help us create homes that welcome us with a sense of comfort, beauty and inspiration. For this to happen there has to be space and flow, space for people to move and space for energy to flow.

 

To create balance in your living spaces, arrange your furnishings so that they open toward you and welcome you into the room. Try not to position your sofa or chairs with their backs to the entry of the room. When positioned this way, they block off energy as effectively as a wall would. Furniture should be placed to encourage movement; energy should be able to flow freely into the space, circle around and then wind it’s way onto the next space. No one piece of furniture should overwhelm the space or other furnishings.

 

Size matters in furniture and feng shui. Keep scale and proportion in focus and your house will feel like a home.

 

Feng Shui Lifestyle™ by Laurie Bornstein