Imagine yourself trying to move through a room while carrying a basket of laundry, a steaming mug of coffee, and a couple of books. Just that small act gives you a much better sense of what a room’s floor plan feels like than a static photo of its interior design ever could. If you feel compelled to pivot at odd angles, sidestep a chair, or shimmy between a wall and a bed, the space is doing more than just look busy. It’s obstructing your ability to use the room well.
Walking space, also referred to as circulation, is essentially how open a room is to facilitate movement. In a novice floor plan, determining where to set large pieces of furniture, such as sofas, beds, or dressers, is an essential first step before you can decide on paint color, throw pillows, table lamps, and how to group accessories or art pieces. You may be able to fit a bed or sofa, dining table, or cabinet within the dimensions of the room, but does that also leave ample walking space in the room’s layout?
A good way to think about walking space and circulation is to map it out on your sketch with arrows that indicate traffic flow. Where are you likely to go from the room’s entrance to a window? From the bed to a closet? From the sofa to a shelf or desk to the room’s doorway, or maybe the desk to the room’s exit? The lines on your drawing do not need to be perfect, and their goal is simply to outline where your body is likely to navigate most of the time. If the walking space around those arrows gets crowded by a chair, a corner, or storage, the design plan is in need of some modification.
At this stage, many beginners get tricked by areas of the wall with nothing on them. They may think the blank wall is the perfect place to squeeze in a console, bookcase, or a chair to serve as a focal point, and yet if that space sits in the direct line of foot traffic in the main walking path for the room, those pieces may be making your design plan seem much more cramped. Don’t forget that not all empty space is wasted space, because sometimes those “gaps” are exactly what makes your floor plan more manageable, particularly if you’re working on a smaller bedroom, rental apartment, or tiny living area.
Rather than rearranging all of the furniture at once to see where it best fits, you might try it with just a piece at a time, starting with the biggest item (beds, sofas, dining tables, desks). From there you check to see if you can access the door or window and get around the piece, then adding in the next item of furniture, and so on. This allows you to avoid overcrowding the layout too early, and helps you evaluate if a piece is actually serving an intended function in the room.
Walking space also plays a big role in determining whether or not a room appears visually balanced. If you move every piece of furniture to one side of the room to clear a path, the space may look crowded on the opposite wall and sparse on the other. But a room filled to the brim in each nook and cranny might feel too busy, even if the rest of the interior design scheme employs calm tones. A good solution typically includes enough clearance for foot traffic but still makes the most out of every area for a variety of purposes including sleeping, relaxing, working, storage, and conversation.
As a final step, it might be helpful to think about how you use the room in any number of instances at any given time. Whether you’re taking down the curtains in the morning, getting ready for bed and reaching for something out of the closet, sitting at a desk to write notes and flip on the lamp, or carrying your laptop from one area of the room to another, it may help identify what doesn’t function in your floor plan design that a two-dimensional sketch might not reveal. Once you determine that the walking space in your layout feels unimpeded in your mental imagery and actually practical in the physical space, the more subjective choices in your design will be easier to assess.