The Best Place To Put Your Coffee Table

Serving as the place to put down your cup or TV remote, display decor, or gather around with friends and family, your coffee table is arguably among the most crucial pieces of furniture in your living room. Aside from its functionality, it also plays a big role in your interior design. Available in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and materials, coffee tables complement just about any home aesthetic you have in mind. But it's not enough to just pick the perfect coffee table for your home. Where and how you place this living room furniture staple could make or break the look of the whole space. And if you feel like going the traditional route, you can rarely go wrong with centering your coffee table in front of your couch. 

Centering the coffee table is a classic placement option for a reason: It gives your living room setup a symmetry while also providing convenience, as it lets you keep all your coffee table items close by. Just mind the space between the sofa and your coffee table, making sure to place them about 14 to 18 inches apart. This will allow you to easily reach for anything you need from coffee table and leave enough legroom to comfortably sit or move around the furniture. When planning your ideal coffee table placement, though, there's a lot more to consider than just symmetry. Your living room's size and shape, the general flow of the space, and the size of your coffee table and other furniture are all important factors when making your decision.

The layout of your other furniture pieces will affect your coffee table's placement, as can the size and shape of the table itself. Figuring out how to position a round coffee table in relation to your other furniture, for instance, may vary from the ideal rectangular table placement, as they create different walking paths. Sometimes, straying from the traditional placement is the way to go. For example, if you have an L-shaped sofa, placing your coffee table off-center might complement your asymmetrical seating choice better and give more room all around the table than a central position. Meanwhile, if you have multiple seating pieces facing each other, centering the coffee table between all of them lets you pull everything together into a balanced seating area, giving everyone equal access to the table's surface. More functional furniture, such as reclining sofas, may also require you to adjust the spacing to allow everything to work smoothly.

Sometimes, the room size is the factor that will likely dictate where you end up putting your coffee table. This is mostly the case with undersized living rooms, where a coffee table in the center of the room could eat up precious space. If you need an easy furniture placement hack that will make your small living room look larger, try putting your coffee table against a wall or beneath a window. This opens up the seating area for a more airy feel while still providing a place to put all your items. When in doubt, test the placement. Consider how you plan to utilize your coffee table (e.g., storage, display, or for eating at while watching TV), and trial different placements while using it as normal to see what is most comfortable.