You know the moment. Two people, one sofa, a doorway, and a growing suspicion that this was a bad idea. Twenty minutes of shuffling, a scraped skirting board, a small argument about whose plan this was — and then you put it back roughly where it started, because the new spot blocks the radiator.
Here is the thing nobody tells you: the arrangement was decidable before anyone lifted anything. Not guessable. Decidable. Rooms are geometry, furniture has fixed dimensions, and the distance a human needs to walk past a coffee table is a known number. The only reason we settle it with our backs is that the alternative usually means learning CAD.
It doesn't anymore. The room layout planner is a to-scale floor plan you draw in about two minutes, in your browser, with no account and nothing to install. Then you push a real-sized sofa around a real-sized room until something clicks. Forty times if you want.
And once you have that, something more interesting happens than "I found where the sofa goes". You start noticing that you were never arranging furniture. You were arranging the space between it.
Draw the room you actually have
Most planners hand you a rectangle. Almost nobody lives in a rectangle.
Real rooms have a chimney breast eating 30 cm out of one wall, an alcove either side of it, a bay window, a radiator exactly where the bed wants to go, and one wall that is inexplicably diagonal. If your plan can't hold those, your plan is fiction — and fiction is what puts a wardrobe 4 cm too wide into an alcove.
So: type a width and depth for a simple room, or tap Draw your own shape and place a corner at every turn of the wall. L-shapes, alcoves, chimney breasts, that diagonal. Corners lock to right angles as you go unless you deliberately pull one away, and every wall carries its live length while you draw, so the plan stays honest as it grows.
Then mark what can't move. Radiators, built-in wardrobes, the kitchen run — drop them in as fixtures and lock them. Now your experiments physically cannot cheat, which is the entire difference between a plan and a wish.
How do you measure a room properly?
Four rules, and they take five minutes:
- Measure wall to wall at floor level, skirting board to skirting board. Walls are not parallel and rooms are not square. Measure at the floor, because that is where the furniture lives.
- Note which way every door opens. A door swing eats a circle whose radius equals the door leaf — usually about 90 cm of floor you cannot furnish.
- Measure your actual furniture, not the product page. This is the one that ruins plans. A sofa listed at 200 cm is routinely 214 across the arms, because listed dimensions quietly omit arms, cushions and feet.
- Write it all down before you open anything. Nothing kills momentum like discovering mid-plan that you didn't measure the alcove.
Real sizes are the whole trick
The library carries 39 pieces at true measurements — seven seating options, seven tables and desks, four bed sizes plus a cot, storage, and the eleven fixtures nobody thinks to draw: a fridge-freezer, a 60 cm washing machine, a bathtub, a toilet, a kitchen counter run, a 90 cm door opening.
Beds, since it is the question everyone asks: single 90 × 200, double 140 × 200, EU queen 160 × 200, EU king 180 × 200, cot 60 × 120. Anything unusual, you type your own width and depth and it behaves like everything else.
But the three pieces that change how you think aren't furniture at all.
There is a standing person. There is a yoga mat — 183 × 61 cm, which turns out to be a brutally honest test of whether a bedroom has any floor left. And there is a wheelchair turning circle: 150 cm across, drop it anywhere, and instantly you can see whether the room works for someone using a chair, a walker, or crutches after surgery.
Put a person into your plan once and you cannot unsee it. The room stops being a container for objects and becomes a place where a body has to move.
How much space should you leave between furniture?
This is where guessing fails hardest, because the numbers are specific and almost nobody knows them. Here they are — recommended, and the minimum you can live with:
| Where | What | Recommended | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole home | Main walkway | 90 cm | 75 cm |
| Whole home | Path between furniture | 60 cm | 45 cm |
| Living room | Sofa to coffee table | 45 cm | 30 cm |
| Living room | Sofa to a 55-inch TV | 220 cm | 170 cm |
| Dining | Chair pull-out space | 90 cm | 60 cm |
| Dining | Walkway behind a seated person | 120 cm | 90 cm |
| Bedroom | Beside the bed | 75 cm | 60 cm |
| Bedroom | Foot of the bed | 90 cm | 60 cm |
| Bedroom | In front of a hinged wardrobe | 90 cm | 60 cm |
| Office | Desk chair push-back | 90 cm | 75 cm |
| Kitchen | Work aisle, one cook | 120 cm | 105 cm |
| Anywhere | Door swing | 90 cm | 76 cm |
| Accessibility | Wheelchair turning circle | 150 cm | 150 cm |
Sliding wardrobe doors need only about 60 cm, which is often the cheapest 30 cm you will ever buy back.
Two of these rows quietly explain most bad rooms. A main walkway under 75 cm makes a space feel wrong in a way people describe as "cramped" without being able to point at the cause. And 90 cm for a dining chair to pull out is the one everyone forgets, which is why so many dining tables can only really seat the people on the outside.
In the planner, the measure tool drags between any two points and reads the gap. So you stop asking "does this look okay?" and start asking "is that 82 cm or 58 cm?" — a question with an answer.
Will my couch fit through the door?
Half the internet answers this wrong by comparing the sofa's width to the door. Width is rarely what fails.
Compare the door's clear opening against the couch's smallest cross-section — usually its depth, or its height with the legs off and cushions removed. A useful rule: a couch will tilt through when
√(depth² + height²) < door opening + about 5 cm of wiggle room
But here is the part that actually decides it: it is almost never the door. It is the turn. The hallway corner, the half-landing, the bend at the top of the stairs. Measure the whole path, not just the doorway, and measure it in plan view — which you now have.
The part where this gets fun
Everything above is the useful half. This is the half worth getting excited about, because when testing a layout drops to two minutes and zero cost, questions that used to be expensive become throwaway:
- You haven't got the keys yet. Take the floor plan from the listing, rebuild it, and find out tonight whether your bed and your desk can coexist in that second bedroom. People sign leases without knowing this.
- Settle the showroom argument before the showroom. Two sofas, one room, one afternoon. Draw both. One of them leaves a 55 cm walkway and the discussion ends.
- Make room for a cot. A 60 × 120 cot needs somewhere with access on at least one long side, and a nursery is usually a room that already had a job. This is a five-minute answer.
- Build a home office into a room that isn't one. Desk chair push-back is 90 cm, and that requirement is what usually makes the "obvious" corner impossible.
- Small spaces. A studio, a box room, an 8 m² bedroom. Constraint is where planning pays best: the margin for error is nil, and the number of viable layouts is small enough that you can find all of them and pick.
- Plan for someone who is about to need it. A parent moving in, a hip replacement coming up, a family member using a chair. Drop the 150 cm turning circle in each room and you will learn something uncomfortable and useful about your own home in about ninety seconds.
- You rent and cannot drill. Then layout is your only lever, so it may as well be a good one.
- Hand it to a nine-year-old. Give a kid their own room to redesign on a tablet, at real scale, with the constraint that everything has to actually fit. It is one of the better accidental geometry lessons going.
- Classrooms, parties, events. Same problem, more chairs. (If it's a classroom you're arranging, the seating chart generator handles the people once the furniture is settled.)
- Test the thing you can't undo. Built-ins, a kitchen run, knocking a wall about. The plan is free. The regret isn't.
Getting it out of the browser
Drag pieces and they snap flush to walls and to each other — which is what makes a sofa sit properly against a wall instead of 3 cm off it — and rotate in 15° steps. Overlap something or push it out of the room and it outlines in red, so a layout that cannot physically exist announces itself instead of quietly looking fine.
The grid is adjustable, and that is what makes fine work possible: block things out roughly at 1 m, then drop to 10 cm or 1 cm to slide a wardrobe into an alcove properly. Snapping follows whatever you pick, so a 1 cm grid really does place to the centimetre. A ruler runs along the top and left edges and starts at zero on your walls, so you can read off how far along a wall anything sits.
When it's right: save it (up to 12 named layouts), export it as JSON to move to another device, or download the plan as a PNG — which is the version that matters, because that's the one you take to the shop on your phone, or send to the person who insists the sofa will fit.
Units switch between cm/m and feet/inches whenever you like, without re-entering anything.
And none of it goes anywhere. The room you draw and everything you place stay in your browser, it keeps working offline once the page has loaded, and there's no account to make. If you want your saved layouts elsewhere, you export them yourself.
Go rearrange something
Measure one room tonight. Just one — the one that has always felt slightly wrong without you being able to say why. Draw it, drop a person in it, and run the measure tool across the walkway you use most.
My bet is you find a number under 75 cm, and that number has been quietly annoying you for years.
Then move the sofa forty times, for free, and only once for real.