Coordinating a Living Room Set: Sofa, Tables and Storage

A living room set is rarely bought in one go. The sofa comes first, an armchair is added later, the coffee table is chosen from a photo, and the TV unit is whatever fits the wall. Each piece can be good on its own and still not look like a set. What ties them together is not a matching model name but a few shared decisions: heights that line up, two or three materials that repeat, and one colour plan.

This guide covers those decisions piece by piece. For the walking routes around the group, see our article on how circulation patterns influence furniture placement.

Start with the sofa and work outward

The sofa sets the measurements everything else follows: seat height, arm height, back height and overall length. Write these four numbers down before you look at tables or storage. Most models in our sofa collection list them on the product page; for a custom size, the numbers come from your order (custom dimensions are available on request).

Then place the other pieces in order of how closely they relate to the sofa: coffee table, armchairs, side tables, console, and finally the TV unit or sideboard on the opposite wall.

Heights that line up

Heights are where a set most often looks wrong, because the eye reads them as one horizontal line across the room. Common rules of thumb:

• Coffee table: level with the seat or up to about 5 cm lower. With a typical seat height of 42–46 cm, that means a table of roughly 38–45 cm.
• Distance to the sofa: 40–50 cm between the sofa front and the table edge, close enough to reach a cup, wide enough to walk past.
• Length: about two-thirds of the sofa length, so a 240 cm sofa pairs well with a table of around 140–160 cm, or two smaller tables used together.
• Side tables: within about 5 cm of the arm height, so a lamp or a glass can be reached without leaning.
• Console behind a sofa: at or slightly below the top of the sofa back, never above it when seen from the room.

In the cover photo, the Coin coffee table sits between a sofa and armchairs. When you plan a group like this, check the table height against the seat height of every piece around it, not only the sofa.

Armchairs: match the seat, not the silhouette

Armchairs do not need to be the same model as the sofa. A contrasting shape often works better, as long as the seat heights are within 2–3 cm of each other, so people sitting opposite each other are at the same eye level.

The upholstery can differ too. A common combination is a leather sofa with fabric armchairs, or the same leather one shade lighter or darker from the same colour family. Sitdesign offers 76 genuine leather colours in 12 colour families; fabric upholstery is possible and customer's own material (COM) is accepted, so a sofa and armchairs can be ordered in coordinated but different covers.

For the layout, two armchairs facing the sofa across the coffee table form a conversation group; leave about 80–90 cm of walking space around the outside of the group.

Materials: choose two or three and repeat them

A set looks planned when each material appears at least twice. Before you choose a coffee table, console or TV unit, decide on:

• One wood tone, repeated for example in the coffee table and the TV unit, or in the console and the side tables.
• One stone or metal accent, used on one or two surfaces rather than on every piece.
• The upholstery of the sofa and armchairs, which counts as the third material.

A matching range makes this easier. The Ordinate range, for example, includes a coffee table, the Ordinate side table and the Ordinate sideboard, so one design can run from the seating group to the storage wall. Mixing ranges works too, provided the wood tone and the metal finish stay consistent.

Colour: one base, one accent

The largest piece carries the base colour, so the colour plan usually starts with the sofa. A widely used guideline is roughly 60% base colour, 30% secondary colour and 10% accent across the room. In practice:

• A cognac or tan leather sofa with walnut-toned wood and a dark metal accent.
• A grey or taupe sofa with light oak tones and one coloured armchair as the accent.
• A black leather sofa with warm wood and a pale stone top on the coffee table to lighten the group.

Ask for leather samples and compare them in the room itself, in daylight, next to the wood and stone finishes.

Console and TV unit: the backdrop

Storage pieces stand furthest from the seating, so they act as the background of the set. Two rules keep them in proportion:

• TV unit width: at least the width of the screen plus about 20–30 cm on each side, so the screen does not look as if it might tip off. Browse our TV units and bookshelves with your screen size in mind.
• Screen height: the centre of the screen at seated eye level, typically around 100–110 cm from the floor, which usually means a TV unit about 40–60 cm high.

A console or sideboard on another wall should share at least one material with the coffee table or the TV unit, so the storage pieces belong to the same family even when they come from different ranges.

Ordering the set together

Every Sitdesign piece is handmade in our own factory in Büyükçekmece, Istanbul. Lead times depend on the type: upholstered pieces take 3–4 weeks, wood pieces 6–8 weeks. If you want the whole set delivered at once, plan around the longer wood lead time, or order the wood pieces first.

Send us your room measurements, a rough list of pieces and your preferred colours through our contact page. We can send leather samples and prepare a quote for the full set.