Ways to Create Symmetry Around Your Fireplace

Carefully arranging your furniture and decorations around your fireplace can help you feel more content and comfortable in your living room.

A home needs to be well organized and tidy. The key to this is finding the right place for all your furniture and decorations, including around your fireplace. Here are a couple of ways that you can create symmetry around your fireplace to get a balanced look.

Wanting to create symmetry in your living room doesn’t make you obsessive or overly fussy. It’s just a way to logically arrange your belongings to create the perfect “setting”.

From early in life, we’re taught that it’s important to keep our rooms tidy, clean, and presentable. It’s therefore not surprising that creating balance and harmony in a room by carefully arranging your furniture can be satisfying.

Creating symmetry in your living room

It’s important to mention that we don’t always maintain exact symmetry in our rooms. However, the human brain often looks for a focus point to coordinate and bring together both the decorations and structural elements.

For example, it’s common to direct furniture towards a particular focus point, which is normally a television. However, it could also be a fireplace. This arrangement would allow you to spend your evenings, have conversations, or practice your hobbies by the warmth of a fireplace.

It doesn’t matter if your fireplace is in a corner or the middle of your room. The most important thing is to think about where you put your decorations, how big they are, and how much room they’ll take up. The aim is to ensure your fireplace is the standout feature of your living room.

It can be eye-opening to critique your home and analyze whether your decorations are well placed and coordinated.

4 ways to create symmetry around your fireplace

To give your living room a new and more pleasing look, it’s important to set yourself objectives and find ways of meeting them. Here are a few useful ideas:

1. If you have an open-plan space, you can use two sofas, one facing the other, to create a perpendicular shape with your fireplace. Creating right angles with your fireplace is a great idea, as it creates clear lines that make a living room look consistent and balanced.
2. If you have a small room, you might not be able to use large furniture to create symmetry. However, you could still use smaller sofas to create a symmetric shape or even combine them with a standalone armchair.
3. Another option is to arrange your furniture around your coffee table so that it becomes a central part of your living room, like your fireplace. By aligning your table with your fireplace you can create two visual elements that catch the eye when you sit in front of them.
4. Symmetrically arranging your furniture will help you create a look with many shapes. In other words, the elements of your room can be separated into different, individual sectors. However, when brought together, they create a balanced space.

The visual effect of creating symmetry around your fireplace

Having explained ways in which you can arrange your living room, it’s important to remember that designing a symmetrical space is also about creating a visual effect that provokes emotion.

A symmetrical space is not only functional, but also comfortable, and so creating symmetry can make you feel quite content. As a result, when you have a get-together in your living room, you’ll feel satisfied that your room and the space around your chimney is laid out correctly.

In contrast, symmetry can disrupt the balance in a space and make a room feel tense.

Key mistakes to avoid

It’s essential to consider the size of your room when trying to create symmetry. In an open-plan space, you can arrange furniture in several different parts of the room to refresh and invigorate the space. That way, not all of the focus will need to be directed towards your fireplace.

However, you don’t need to point all of your furniture towards one focal point to create symmetry. For example, you could have a table and chairs situated elsewhere in the room. The most important thing is for the main components, such as the sofa and coffee table, to be the standout features in the room.

Trying to make your fireplace fade into the background would be a big mistake. It’s an essential part of your home’s decoration and it can play a major role in its appearance. A fireplace not only generates warmth but also a sense of harmony.