Furniture Scale: Finding the Right Chair Size For Your Sofa

Proportion and scale are terms used to define the right balance in a room. The general knowledge of the world will understand when something is too big, too small, and just right when placing furniture in a room, but how do you know what to look for before you bring it home? Learn how to judge correctly what will look best in your home by measuring up the essentials.

I have a client who just purchased a large, low and very deep Chesterfield sofa. WeE have been working for a while on finding the proper chair based on the dimensions of the sofa. WE waited until the sofa arrived and saw how much space we had to work with.

After noting the low profile of the sofa and neighboring chairs to a dining set, we decided to keep that consistent throughout the room. Another aspect of the room that helped us determine the shape of the new club chairs was the fact that most of the elements in the room were rectangular or square. Therefore we knew that we needed to introduce something round to add some contrast yet complimentary lines in the space.

Here are some general tips when deciding on chairs:

If it is Too Big: Traditional styling isn’t this wing chair’s problem. There are very modern versions of the wing chair out on the market today. Proportion is. The high back is strong and sometimes considered masculine, and it could potentially overpower a lower-back sofa, which should be the room’s largest focal piece for upholstery goods

If it is Too Small: A small chair can prove that there’s more to scale than height. Sure, it’s a problem if it is incredibly short next to a large, tall, high back sofa. But a chair, for example, that had a lot of texture or visual uniqueness could contribute to the competition of a sofa that stands quiet and soft in a room. Think of a chair that may have razor-thin back, reedy legs, and paper-width sides, but maybe you select a loud fabric to make sure it is heard in the composition of the room…sometimes you can break the rule with scale if it is achieved in texture and style.

This club chair that we selected is about 30” wide by 37” deep and is somewhere in a general range of dimensions for a “practical” chair. Finding something in this range of scale will often be considered a safe choice when shopping for new furniture. I recommend measuring.

Measure twice! Purchase once! Then you will be sure to have a happy solution in the end!