Living Interior
Twenty-eight feet long and eleven feet six wide, with a chimney breast on the long wall and the only good window at the far end. Three previous furniture arrangements had all produced the same result: a corridor with a sofa in it.
Giving up on one room
The mistake everyone makes with a long room is trying to make it one room. We planned it as two, without building anything between them.
- A fireplace group: two armchairs and a small sofa, turned to face each other across a low table
- A window group: a daybed, a reading lamp and a bookcase, facing out
- A four-foot gap between them, deliberately empty, which reads as a threshold
- A single long rug under each group, stopping well short of the other
Why the gap works
The instinct is to fill that middle four feet with a console or a plant. Leaving it empty is what tells the eye there are two places here rather than one long one, and it is the only part of the scheme the clients queried before installation and defended afterward.
A narrow room fights you if you treat it as a single space. Two small rooms that happen to share a floor is a much easier problem.
Joinery
The chimney breast has alcoves of unequal depth, a common result of a later flue. Rather than disguise it, we built two different cabinets: a deep one with doors on the left, a shallow open shelf on the right, both running to the picture rail and both painted the wall color. The asymmetry stops being visible once the cabinets stop pretending.
Light
Nothing on the ceiling except a single dimmed downlight over each group. Everything else is at table height: four lamps, all on one switched circuit at the door, which means the room turns on properly with one action.
Outcome
Seven weeks, of which five were the joinery. The family reports that both ends of the room now get used, which had not previously been true of the far end at all.
