Why We Needed a Sofa Table (and you might, too!)
For three years we desperately needed a sofa table, and the solution was so simple, it’s silly to think that it took so long!
I love the look of a sofa table. In most open concept living rooms (where your sofa likely backs up to open space), a sofa table is an obvious choice. It provides a place to set things, like a beverage or the TV remote, it gives an opportunity for décor and mood lighting and creates a more aesthetically pleasing divide to the space than does the back of a sofa (in most cases, anyway). It can also protect the upholstery on the back of your couch, prolonging the life of what’s probably one of your more expensive furniture pieces. Here’s an example by Studio McGee:
Arizona Homestead Project by Studio McGee
Our living room is not laid out in such a way. It’s not a huge, open-concept space. In fact, it’s hugged on three sides by walls and is not the kind of living room where you center a massive area rug and then your furniture can just float beautifully in the room. (Not to say the room can’t still be beautiful, but it has it’s layout limits.)
View of our living room - you can see there isn't a lot of space for "floating" furniture. But we do still have a gorgeous area rug!
And a view of the sofa wall.
Instead, our sectional sofa backs to the wall with just enough room for a kid-friendly, round, leather ottoman, a couple of side tables and baskets, some floor space for the kids to play, and that’s pretty much it. The layout was working just fine, but it wasn’t great. Something was missing.
Because we have little kids, that vase, unfortunately, does not live on the ottoman.
Remember when I said a sofa table provides a place to set things? Well, our sectional is over 12’ long, so unless you were sitting on either end of the sofa, there was never anywhere to set anything… like a cup of coffee or your phone or the TV remote. Sure, two of these three things can be tossed on the couch, but in a matter of moments they inevitably find themselves wriggled between the cushions and “lost” for the foreseeable future, especially with little kid feet constantly pattering atop the cushions. And because my kiddos are still little and wild, the hard edges of a coffee table don’t work for us, so the ottoman really only serves as visual balance, a footrest, and a platform from which to jump (if you’re 2 – 4 years old, anyway). Below is a closer representation of how the ottoman tends to look…
Isn't it pretty? I call it "kid chic".
I wanted a space to set all the things, but above all, I wanted a buffer between the sofa and the wall when I FINALLY decided to add some artwork to the large blank wall behind the sofa.
One of the beginning gallery wall configurations is shown below… it’s still evolving.
That faux tree also moves around - right now it lives in our dining room!
I looked and looked, but it was impossible to find a table that fit the proportions I needed. (Which was really long, and pretty narrow).
Generally speaking, you want your sofa table to be at LEAST 2/3 the length of your sofa, but this is more so if your sofa floats. Since ours backs to the wall, something full length just makes more sense for our living room.
A couple of other things to consider when shopping for (or creating) sofa tables:
· Aim for something roughly the height of your sofa back. Up to four to six inches lower than this can work, but you want to be able to reach things back there. Something too low defeats this purpose.
· Consider the depth. About 12-20” is a good rule of thumb for a table behind a floating sofa. Take into account circulation in the room and try to maintain a minimum of 30” of circulation space (36-42” is better).
Because the main purpose of our sofa table is that of a wall buffer, with its secondary purpose being a drink ledge, ours is only 5 ½”. It wasn’t a magic number that suited the room best, it’s a dimension that was roughly what I was looking for that I could also easily find at Home Depot.
Yep, I just made something from a couple of simple boards, and it makes a WORLD of difference in the functionality of the room. It’s really a pretty simple process of butt joining two boards and attaching them to the wall with brackets (and making one side pretty with pole wrap), but I can lay out the details in my next post for those who want to dig a little deeper. For now I’ll leave you with a couple of final images. Thanks for stopping by!
Just a small shelf created a great buffer away from the wall and created so much more functionality.
The very basic construction of this piece is shown here. Nothing too crazy! But much needed and worth the few hours it took to make.
Now we have a reading light in this corner, AND a place to set a coffee cup. This corner just keeps getting cozier! Stay tuned for the simplest tutorial you might ever come across!