Narrow living room ideas: seven rooms with clever layouts to copy
A narrow living room is the almost inevitable curse of the terraced townhouse, and always pose the same problems. How do you pack in a versatile seating arrangement, is there room for a coffee table, and where do you put the TV, if it is a TV room? We've seen plenty of good ideas on our pages, many of which share the same approaches: make smart use of built in joinery (a more stylish way to house a TV than simply mounting it on the wall), consider a narrow ottoman rather than a coffee table (good for putting your feet up), and arrange your seating in an L-shape, either with an L-shaped sofa, or by putting the sofa against the long wall and chairs in the window. Keep scrolling for our favourite narrow living room ideas from the archive.
The below room in Sophie Warburton's London house is perhaps the most typical layout to be found a terraced house, with a bay window at the front, a fireplace in the middle, and a long, narrow space in between. Sophie's approach to it is a classic one: a sofa against one wall, an ottoman in the middle, and armchairs both in the window and in the corner nearer the door. Shelves on either side of the fireplace make for an obvious place to situate a television.
The ‘middle room’ in a terraced house, i.e. the one between the front sitting room and the usual kitchen extension at the back, is often tricky. Interior designer Polly Ashman has made the one in her west London house (below) into a narrow TV room, with an internal window looking into the hallway. A full wall of joinery makes the most of the space, with a TV housed in the middle, and a narrow ottoman is a good solution instead of a coffee table. Because this room is being used purely to watch TV, it doesn't need a more sociable seating plan.
One of our favourite narrow living room ideas is in this elegant west London house by Lucy Hammond Giles of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler (below), where the wall of joinery has once again proved very useful. Lucy has used the owners' B&B Italia sofa against one wall, a narrow ottoman, and then a colourful wall of shelves that provides space for the TV as well as books and plants. Slender armchairs and an extra table occupy the end of the room by the window. One of the reasons this room feels luxurious rather than mean is the scale of the art behind the sofa. Lucy has used a large piece in the centre, surrounded by lots of smaller pieces, which gives the room a strong focal point other than the television.
Lonika Chande has done clever things with the living room of this terraced house in Chelsea (below), building the joinery around the sofa (as well as on one side of the chimneybreast) for maximum storage and also plenty of interesting colour. We rather like the use of a long mirror over the sofa, which helps to create a greater feeling of space.
Designer Rachael Gowdridge has created a cosy space in the snug of this Georgian townhouse in Clerkenwell, proving the oft-cited maxim that in a small space, it's better to over-scale your furniture. Rather than trying to cram in a sofa on one wall and armchairs on the other, she has used the corner to create a sociable arrangement with an oversized L-shaped sofa. The other corner is filled with a shearling armchair by Jørgen Bækmark.
The narrowness of the below room in Julia Barnard's Somerset cottage posed problems for making it into a cosy library space. Julia has cleverly had the bookshelves built into the wall to make the most of the space, and also built the Chilmark stone fire in, the flue of which is part of the back wall. The mantelpiece lines up exactly with the bookshelves. Julia’s upholsterer cut the middle out of two family sofas that had seen better days, making them into two-seater sofas with matching camel backs. It's a fun alternative to the usual arrangement, in which the sofa is necessarily jammed up against one wall.
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