Narrow living room ideas: eight rooms with clever layouts to copy

Narrow living room ideas: For an original take on built-in joinery, we like This House by Hugh LeslieA particularly narrow living room is enlivened by a clever set of wooden shelves. Here the shelves do not completely occupy the room, because there is a lot of space between its top and the cornice, which allows the proportions of the architecture to sing.

Simon Brown

A narrow living room is an almost inevitable bane of a terraced townhouse, and always creates the same problems. How do you pack in versatile seating arrangements, is there room for a coffee table, and if there is a TV room, where do you put the TV? We’ve seen plenty of good ideas on our pages, many of which have similar approaches: make smart use of built-in joinery (a more stylish way to mount a TV on the wall), consider a narrow ottoman instead of a coffee table (good for putting your feet up), and arrange your seating in an L-shape, or even a long one in front of a long-shaped one. A wall and chairs in the window. Keep scrolling for our favorite narrow living room ideas from the archives.

In the room below Sophie Warburton’s London home Perhaps the most common layout is the terraced house, with a bay window at the front, a fireplace in the middle and a long, narrow space between. Sophie’s approach to it is classic: a sofa against one wall, an ottoman in the middle, and an armchair near the door and both in the corner. Shelves on either side of the fireplace make an obvious place to keep the television.

Chris Horwood