Fred Gonsowski Garden Home

Recently one of my readers typed a note in the comments, asking for my help with her decorating dilemma. Summer R. has a 16 foot by 20 foot living room with four points of entry, and a fireplace built into one of the corners of the room and she is having a hard time arranging furniture in the space.

I asked Summer to measure each wall starting at the left corner, working to the right side of that wall. I instructed her to write down the distance from the corner of the room to the first window ( if that was what it was), the length of that window, the amount of inches of space after that window to any door in the room, its width, and the amount of inches from the door (it here was one on that wall) to the right corner of the room. I told her to do that for each wall, and make sure she labeled the walls for north, south, east and west; so I would know which walls were which when making a scaled drawing of her space.

I then asked her to take measurements of any furniture she had, for depth and length, that she would be working with in the space.  Summer supplied them and asked for suggestions for anything else that could be added, to make for an interesting and comfortable arrangement of furniture.   Now let’s look at the eight different ways of arranging her furniture that I came up with. Continue reading →

Recently a reader asked for my help with the placement of furniture in her 20 foot square living room after reading my blog post titled “Arranging furniture around a Fireplace in the Corner of a Room“. Initially I thought the space would be easy to lay out, but because of a corner fireplace, french doors, three entrances into the room, and windows on two walls, there was not much wall-space to put furniture against. So my readers dilemma became the inspiration for this article, which is a topic that I had not yet covered here at FGGH. Continue reading →

If you possibly are the inhabitant of a row house or town house that was built somewhere around 1890, you could now have a living room that measures about 12 feet wide by 24 feet long. Your living room, back in the day, most likely started out as two 12 foot by 12 foot rooms. One of the rooms was a formal parlor and the other one was a living room. Those two spaces were probably once divided by a non-load bearing wall with pocket doors, or there was an archway. In one or both of the rooms could have been, or still is a wooden or marble mantelpiece, which is a decorative non-working fireplace. I have found that many of my readers have rooms like that which also have many doors and windows cutting up the wall spaces, which makes it a challenge arranging furniture. For this post I’ve come up with 12 possible ways of arranging furniture in the space, and I hope one or more of them you can apply to your home. Continue reading →

When most people go to decorate a room with a tall ceiling, they seem to arrange their furniture and decorative accessories around the bottom half of the space. A lot of their choices for decorations seem to be horizontal format (wider than tall). By choosing horizontal format furniture, art works and accessories, those items are not / can not in any way accentuate the most important feature in the space its height. When you pay extra money for taller ceilings, or are lucky enough to have a room(s) with high ones, you don’t want your furniture and decorative choices going against, in a negative way, the asset of height that you have. You want to accentuate height, not diminish it. In this post, my objective is to get you thinking about ways of adding vertical tension to your rooms. Continue reading →

Every so often a person comes across a house with characteristics that are not common-everyday. One of those different kinds of features is a fireplace in the corner of a room. Having to arrange furniture around it might be a daunting experience for the amateur decorator. I hope that through this post your uncertainties are erased. I know that once you look at the illustrations you will be inspired, and it will be a snap to arrange your furniture and create a space that is a warm and inviting place to be in. Continue reading →

Interior decorating is a lot like a two-sided scale. When you have a two-sided scale, your objective is to have equal balance on both sides. Look at the first drawing in the illustration for this post.

On one side of the scale you have a ONE POUND block of chocolate. On the other side, to counterbalance it, you must come up with another one pound measurement. You could counterbalance the one pound block of chocolate with another one pound block of chocolate. You could also counterbalance the one pound block with a One Half Pound block of chocolate and one half pound of chocolate chips. Another counterbalancing option could be one pound of chocolate chips. It does not matter how you do it, as long as you have equal balance on both sides. If you can understand this concept, a lot of what interior decorating is all about will come easy to you.

Now let’s take the concept of equal balance using chocolate, and relate it to interior decorating. Continue reading →