Choosing right sofa for your new apartment advice, Property furniture tips, Home interior design style, House decor

Choosing Right Sofa for Your New Apartment

3 May 2024

Building a comfortable living room look that feels like home is not difficult, but you need to break it down into manageable steps. For most people, it starts with a sofa. As the largest piece in the room, it sets the tone for the rest of your choices, even if they deviate from its basic style. Picking the right sofa makes the rest of your room decor easy to choose.

Home Sofa Design Style

The key to setting up a living room that looks coherent and relaxing to yourself and your guests, start with a style. You can combine a couple of them, but one still needs to establish the baseline that your accent styles riff on. If you want a room that looks full and displays all your keepsakes and collectibles, a maximalist approach with a furniture style that leans into the ornate is the key. On the other side of the spectrum, the clean lines and geometric regularity of modern styles appeal to those who like a less cluttered approach.

Apartment Furniture Size

Most apartment living rooms are a little smaller than in freestanding homes, which is why the 74-inch sofa is often called apartment-sized. By contrast, a standard sofa is 84 inches, and some oversized leather sofa varieties run to 91 or 94 inches. When considering the size you want, it’s not just the floor footprint you need to worry about.

The design of many apartments can make it difficult to even get a larger sofa through the door and into a living room. Make sure you measure carefully so you know that you have the clearance you need to bring your sofa inside when the delivery day rolls around.

Home Sofa Material

Sofas come in a variety of materials and upholstery options, but a few stand out as the most popular. Both leather and suede sofas are common for premium sofa designs because they are not only comfortable and high-quality, but they are also durable. Well-cared-for leather or suede will outlast even the best cloth upholstery without needing to be repaired or relined. The other side of that consideration is that fabric is a lot easier to repair or replace. As a result, an investment in a quality sofa with fabric upholstery gives you more options if you want to change the fabric color or texture later.

Putting the Apartment Design Together

It’s often easier to start with the material and size you want, and then look for styles that speak to you if you’re designing a room from scratch. If you have other furniture and you’re replacing a sofa, work with the pieces you have to find a sofa that complements them. Otherwise, the next step after a sofa choice? Picking out the rest of the furniture to build a look around that sofa.

Finishing a Living Room Layout

Balancing the number of pieces you need against the space you have is mostly a matter of deciding how many people you need to be able to seat. Once you have that, you can pick sofas and chairs that fit the space to reach the goal. After that, it’s a matter of having the end tables and storage you need to finish the space, but it all starts with a sofa.

Comments on this guide to 5 Considerations for Choosing the Right Sofa for Your New Apartment article are welcome.