Furniture Arrangement & Space Planning

The interior designer is expected to assemble beautiful furnishings, materials and colours in an imaginative and attractive composition, BUT the success of his design rests only temporarily on superficial appearances. It is eventually judged on how well the interior functions and how successfully it provides for his client’s needs.
 
Furniture Arrangement
In creating a functional environment, today’s designer finds standardized or memorized furniture arrangements almost useless since it is obvious that each client’s needs are unique. He must give careful consideration to the proper division and allocation of space, the flow of traffic, activity planning, and the relationship of scale and mass of furnishings to the interior space before him.
When this approach is applied to each client’s problems, the interiors that result are individual and clearly superior to stereotyped furniture arrangements. Furniture will fall quite simply and logically into proper place, and the designer will then be free to apply his skill to the aesthetic impression he wishes to make.
 
Analysis of Space
The designer begins by studying his interior space. If a plan is unavailable, he must make a floor plan of the actual space. Using a scale rule is a MUST.
 
Division of Space
A town planner studies his town, but interior designers study rooms.  Lets try to think like town planners. Lets sketch in “streets”, thereby subdividing a space of a room, like a city so we get a traffic plan.
Create traffic patterns. Divide this town into different zones and add streets. This will help us on the next step, activity planning.
 
Activity Planning
Activity planning is the phase of the project in which the designer carefully analyzes the client’s intended use of the space and determines the furniture requirements. The client contributes a great deal of information to this phase.
The designer researches the intended use of the space in detail, studying the residential client’s life style and the commercial client’s job requirements.
The designer charts the activities which the specific space before him must satisfy.
 
Furniture Placement
Relationship of scale and mass to Space
Potentially, every eye is capable of discrimination in scale, since man is conditioned to objects dimensioned to human size in daily life. In an interior, the scale of furnishings is based on their proper proposition to man, to other objects used, and to the space in which they appear.
 
Contrast of vertical and horizontal elements
To avoid monotony, it is generally necessary to vary the direction of the real or imaginary lines that are formed by architectural features and furnishings. A room accented by high windows, doors and columns, needs the horizontal balance of sofas, long tables and desks.
An interior devoid of vertical architectural accents needs the balance of high pieces of furniture or commanded wall decorations to heighten the line of a piece of furniture below.
 
Harmonious Composition
Unity in room composition is approached when an additional balancing factor is incorporated in the emerging design concept that involves the relationship of objects to each other.
The same principles of scale and mass that apply between the furnishings to the overall space apply also between objects themselves.