Image Courtesty www.lmbinteriors.com

Bowling alleys are fun but not when it comes to room design.  Home-buyers need to imagine being able to easily place their own furnishings into the homes that they are considering purchasing.

Image Courtesty www.spacesstreamlined.com

Home staging a long room to avoid a bowling alley room design, will help not only your own comfort in the rooms in which you live, it will also help potential homebuyers envision the opportunity that a room has to offer.

Hmmmm, grey and orange seriously trending from accents to walls, if you haven’t noticed lol!

Image Courtesty InteriorDesignPortland.com

Whether you have just moved into a new home or are struggling with furniture placement in a long room, or you need to make your marketing photos look smashing, the following tricks will help:

1. Arrange furniture for a long room over to one side of the room to allow space for people to walk a straight line and passage way from one room to another, without interrupting conversational seating areas.
2. Limit the number of furniture pieces and place furniture in a corner arrangement. This allows people to walk through the room past the furniture at an angle. Use an ottoman that can be used both for storage and as a stand in coffee table or extra seating when needed.
3. Place a loveseat or sofa depending on the width of the room facing and in front of the fireplace/window focal point. Using a sofa table behind will stop the eye and divide the room.
4. Using end, coffee tables and art with the round elements will detract from the long lines of a room.
5. Place freestanding bookshelves at the end of the room to allow for foot traffic, should your room be too narrow to comfortably walk between the piece and the furniture in front of the piece.
6. Divide it! Stage two or more separate groupings in the room. Create an area for conversation, another for music/games, or one for media viewing. The possibilities are endless!  Think outside of the box.
7. Use area rugs to define each space to tie the whole design together.
8. Using darker colors on the short walls at either end of the long space will shorten the space visually.  Paint works wonders in long rooms, simply by painting an end wall a darker color the room will magically appear to jump forward.
9. Hang artwork with strong horizontal lines on the end walls, this will visually make the room appear wider and the length of the room appear shorter.
10. Choosing smaller pieces of furniture and pulling the room arrangment toward the center of the room (where space allows) will create the illusioin of a shorter space.

Bonus:  By adding a strong, brightly colored focal point to the coffee table will naturally draw out our eyes attention and distract from the problem of a long space.

Try to incorporate a few tricks into your design and what was once an awkward room will feel stylish and comfortable.