Less Is More

Too many doorways, not enough wall space.

That was the decorating dilemma faced by Tamara Durett last fall when she set out to purchase a new sofa for the small family room of her northwest valley home.

Given the room’s awkward shape and architectural features, Durett said she figured her furniture style and placement options would be limited.

“I just couldn’t find something that was small enough to fit in the spot,” she said.

That’s where Nancy Conway was able to help. A longtime local employee of La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries, she is a “store designer” (the company’s title for its on-staff interior design experts) at the Centennial Hills location, 5700 Centennial Center Blvd.

As part of complimentary design services offered to La-Z-Boy customers, Conway visited Durett’s home, assessed the space and assisted her in selecting the Aspen-model sectional sofa, which proved to be a perfect fit for the petite room.

“The eye sees one piece of furniture with a sectional, thereby making the room look less busy,” Conway explained. “We used fewer pieces for a cleaner, more spacious look.”

The key to furnishing small rooms is selecting pieces that are properly scaled for the space.

“The less there is for the eye to perceive as big and bulky or busy, the more clean the space is going to look, and neat and tidy and tailored,” she said.

Disregarding furniture’s scale is one of the biggest mistakes that shoppers can — and often do — make, Conway said.

“They measure the length and the width and the depth (of a piece), but they don’t look at the scale, and the scale can play a bigger role … than the actual footprint” of a piece.

A standard 84-inch-long sofa with large “rolled” arms, a highly cushioned back and wide, wooden “bun” feet, she said, can appear up to 2 feet larger than a sofa of equal size sporting a tightly upholstered back, a narrow “track” arm and a tapered foot.

“When you put that really big arm in a very tiny room, your eye is immediately going to go, ‘Wow, that’s a big sofa,’ when physically on a footprint, it’s the same size as the other one.”

Last year La-Z-Boy debuted in its stores nationwide the Urban Attitudes collection, which features contemporary sofas, chairs and ottomans that boast lower profiles and narrow arms, among other sleek design elements. The pieces suit spaces of all sizes, but fit particularly well in smaller dwellings and rooms.

On the collection’s Deco Premier sofa, for example, “The back is very tight, and the arm is very narrow, so when you look at it, it almost looks like a loveseat, and yet it’s the same length … as most standard-sized sofas,” Conway said.

She noted that Urban Attitudes’ “sophisticated, tailored, contemporary appearance” appeals to aging baby boomers who may be downsizing from a large family home to a smaller residence, as well as younger customers who appreciate its hip, midcentury-inspired styling.

Interior designer Ken Wolfson, owner of Las Vegas-based Ken Wolfson Interior Design, is also a fan of midcentury modern furniture. Three years ago he purchased several authentic, 1950s-era pieces to decorate a couple of units at the Manhattan Condominiums in southeast Las Vegas, which range from nearly 900 square feet to more than 1,500 square feet.

With its narrow widths and low profiles, the vintage furniture “fit in really well” with the small floor plans there, he said.

Wolfson is also a real estate developer. In 2010 he developed and designed The Avenue, a residential and office building at 621 S. Tonopah Drive, for which he sparsely furnished a pair of 1,600-square-foot loft apartments.

“When you walked in you saw open plots of floor space, and I didn’t overstuff the space with furniture,” which helped the lofts look and feel larger in size, he said.

Decorating with what he calls “underscaled” pieces serves the same purpose.

“You can really kind of get the furniture even overly diminutive so that it tricks the eye to make the space feel larger,” he said.

An upholstered chair only a few inches smaller than the standard 28- to 34-inch-wide variety sold by most major furniture retailers can increase a floor plan’s efficiency without compromising comfort.

“The smaller pieces are the ones that are going to physically function in a smaller floor plan,” Wolfson said.

Conway said she urges space-crunched customers to toss aside old furniture-buying conventions, such as purchasing a sofa and loveseat set, and opt instead for individual pieces.

“It gives you so much more versatility because you can’t separate a loveseat, but if you have a sofa and two (occasional) chairs, those chairs can be split apart, put on opposite sides of the sofa,” or moved to another room when they’re not needed, she explained.

She also encourages customers to consider purchasing furniture pieces that serve multiple functions, such as a sofa table that can double as a desk or an ottoman that also works as additional seating while providing hidden storage beneath its cushion.

When furnishing small spaces, Wolfson said less really is more.

“I think once you’re in a place in your life … when you downsize in your floor plan, you have to buy less things and have less things. The main thing is to think … ‘I’m gonna buy a great sofa, a cool coffee table and I’m gonna keep things simple in their quantity and their size.’ ”