What should the basic form of your furniture be?

Once you decide what materials your furniture should be made of, other questions come to the fore:  What should that furniture look like at a very, very basic level?

Regardless of our personality, culture, and other similar factors, humans will respond in predictable ways to lines that they see, in 2-dimensions in upholstery and 3-D in the shapes of the furniture itself (for example, a line drawn along the top of a sofa or the legs of a table).

We associate curving lines (again in 2-D and also in 3-D) with comfort and find it comfortable in spaces that feature them, we also feel calmer when they predominate.  Upholstery patterns with lots of smoothly rounded organic shapes, for instance, are a great choice in that den where you want to decompress or your bedroom.  The same goes for furniture with curvier backs or arms or legs or tabletop shapes, for instance.  Have a laundry room or an exercise space?  Those are areas where efficiency and action are a real plus, so all of the more angular furniture that you moved out of that den or bedroom can “live” there.

No space ever features entirely curvilinear lines or entirely rectilinear/angular ones.  A space of the first sort would seem plucked from a cartoon for toddlers and one of the second type would seem drawn from a futuristic sci-fi horror movie.  We’re always talking about relative numbers of curving and straight lines.  Even a paisley print has a few straight lines in it (although they may be short!) and the most rectilinear of rectilinear designs generally works in a circle or oval every so often.

Furniture (and the way that it’s arranged, which we’ll talk about here even though arrangement is reviewed in much more detail later) can also be more or less symmetrical. There are lots of different sorts of symmetry, for example, items can be mirror images of each other or arranged evenly around a centre hub, like the spokes on a wheel.  All sorts of symmetry are pleasant for us to look at while asymmetry spurs us to action.  Want people to feel super comfortable in a chair in your living room? Make sure both its arms are the same size/shape and in the same place.  Want people to feel slightly on edge, maybe to move on with all due speed?  Use a seat with asymmetrical arms or a back whose shape slopes up or down to one side, for instance, in your foyer to get people moving into your home.  Symmetry in upholstery does not have as powerful effect on us as symmetry in the overall shape of a piece of furniture, but it still has a meaningful effect; so make sure when you buy fabric, talk to an upholstery, etc., the final upholstery job is symmetrical or not, as you choose—for example: two toucans facing each other on the left and right sides of the back of your chair, not a toucan on the left and half of a palm tree on the right.

Moving beyond the scale of the design of an individual chair to the placement of multiple chairs and other pieces of furniture: Some sort of symmetrical arrangement, such as the same sort of chair on either side of your fireplace or at either end of your sofa will create a positive lower energy space than when there’s no symmetry—all of which can be desirable or undesirable depending on whether you’re putting together a home gym or an office.  Symmetrical spaces don’t challenge us to explore and understand them, asymmetrical ones do.

Balance in furniture arrangement is a lot like symmetry so we might as well cover it here.  When the furniture in your home is balanced, you’ll feel more comfortable, relaxed, and ready to deal with mental tasks at hand.  In any space, in any viewed scene, there is an apparent fulcrum, like the pivot point on a see saw.  When you are looking at the far wall in a room, this fulcrum is usually at the midpoint of that wall, halfway from both the left and right end of that wall.  Larger, heavier seeming objects need to be closer to that fulcrum/pivot point and lighter ones further away from it for the whole scene to seem in balance—just as to balance a see saw the lighter person in a pair sits further from the middle of the see saw and the heavier person closer to the centre (that is the pivot point).  Something can seem heavier or lighter for a number of reasons, as discussed in this article. 

The form of your furniture can also be more or less complex and have a corresponding effect on the visual complexity in a space.  We discussed visual complexity and how to manage it in detail here. Also look up “Visual complexity” in the top right search box, or create your own magazine here from all our articles.  piece of furniture that incorporates relatively more shapes, colours, and patterns, for example, will seem more complex, although that apparent complexity gets reduced some when all those components seem to be arranged with some sort of order, say with symmetry (symmetry is really important for humans).  Since there are so many rectangular shapes in a room (think: windows and doors), a chair back that is fundamentally rectangular adds less complexity to a space than one with a hexagonal shaped back.  Upholstery can add complexity to a space when it includes patterns.  As mentioned in the lined-to article above, your goal visual complexity-wise is to match the level of a residential interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright—look at a picture of one of his home interiors to get an idea of the number of colours and patterns to use and how to arrange elements, for example.  A space with too little going on visually is just as stressful for us as one with too much—spaces that are stark and bleak are not good for our mental health.

Also, if you’re planning on using furniture with carved pieces, that can be great or not from a visual complexity perspective, depending on what else you’ve chosen to place in your room—but it will definitely add to your workload, as you’ll need to dust it eventually.  And dust it you must because nothing is worse for our self esteem than living in a home that we don’t feel is clean, and eventually we all get to the point where dust destruction is in order.