Design Anatomy
Welcome to Design Anatomy, where we examine the world of interiors and design. With a shared passion for joyful, colour-filled, and lived-in spaces, Bree Banfield and Lauren Li are excited to share their insights and inspiration with you.
YouTube channel launching soon.
Design Anatomy
Crafting Your Perfect Living Space: A Designer's Guide to Furniture Planning
Five simple steps can transform your furniture scheme from random and disjointed to purposeful and cohesive. Lauren flies solo this week, sharing her professional interior design expertise on creating spaces that truly work.
The foundation of any successful interior is a well-planned floor plan. Lauren recounts a cautionary tale from early in her career when a beautiful (and expensive) sofa wouldn't fit in a client's space due to unexpected architectural changes. Whether you're an amateur using painter's tape to mark out furniture dimensions or a professional with design software, knowing exactly what fits where prevents costly mistakes and disappointment.
Today's open-plan homes present unique challenges. Without walls to define spaces, your furniture placement needs to create distinct zones while maintaining proper scale and proportion. Lauren advises moving beyond the "doctor's waiting room" arrangement of pushing everything against walls, instead creating conversation areas that reflect how you actually live. Does your dining table serve as homework central? Where do you drop your groceries? These daily realities should drive your design decisions.
Every compelling room features textural contrast and thoughtful lighting. Lauren explains why matching furniture sets fall flat and how mixing materials like velvet, timber, and stone creates visual depth. She encourages incorporating at least some pattern for dynamic interest, and emphasizes planning lighting from the earliest stages—even before construction begins. A well-placed floor lamp, wall sconce, or table lamp transforms the atmosphere of any room, but requires forethought about power outlet placement.
Bree is now offering a 90-minute online design consult to help you tackle key challenges like colour selection, furniture curation, layout, and styling. Get tailored one-on-one advice and a detailed follow-up report with actionable recommendations—all without a full-service commitment.
Bookings now open - Book now
Join Lauren online to discuss Trade Day a critical step in a project before getting too far in & having to pare it all back.
Or break down the design steps to run your project & business a little smoother with the Design Process MasterClass
Welcome to Design Anatomy, the interior design podcast hosted by friends and fellow designers. Me, brie Banfield.
Speaker 2:And me, Lauren Lee, with some amazing guest appearances along the way.
Speaker 1:We're here to break down everything from current trends to timeless style.
Speaker 2:With a shared passion for joyful, colour-filled and lived-in spaces. We're excited to share our insights and inspiration with you.
Speaker 1:Before we jump into our episode, lauren and I would love to share what's happening with us in our actual, real jobs. At the moment, we're offering a 90-minute design consult online. So if you're overwhelmed by options, second-guessing your style or just living in a space that doesn't feel right, a 90-minute consult with me could make all the difference. So it's one focused online session. We'll work through all your key challenges, whether it's choosing colors, curating furniture, making sure the layout works or even just styling a space. It's tailored advice from me, one-on-one, and you'll receive a clear written report afterwards with everything we discussed, plus some extra recommendations so you can move forward with confidence. So it's a no full service commitment, just expert help right when you need it. And bookings are available now so you can head to the show notes to find out more there.
Speaker 2:Actually, brie's not here today. This is just Lauren, because Brie has lost her voice, so the most glamorous part of the Design Anatomy podcast is not here, but I want to talk to you about five ways to nail your furniture scheme. Just a small episode, just me today, but I hope that there is some good information for me to share with you. So stick around. Before I get started, I just want to speak to the designers out there listening for a second, because I am helping you figure out how to run a trade day. So if that's not part of your design process, I really really think it should be. Because I guess at the beginning I was a bit resistant to the idea of a trade day because it means gathering the builder, maybe even the architect if it's a new build or drafts person, and if it's a furniture project, it could be the window furnishings consultant or your wallpaper installer, gathering them together really early on in the piece. And I was just like how am I going to do that yet when we don't even have the wallpaper chosen or we don't even have the floor plan designed yet? How are we going to even talk about the design's like? Well, it's actually really smart to bring them in early, because then we can talk about big picture budgeting and ideas. So when we get all of our experts in the room together, we can put all of the expertise and figure out what is doable before we design the impossible. Because I'd found that I had created this incredible design on well, the client's wish list and all of the things, only for a builder to come in right at the end, when we'd completed the whole construction drawing package, to find that there were structural walls that would be really expensive to move and the whole design kind of didn't work. We'd have to start again. It was really disappointing, not just for me but obviously for the clients, because they've spent all of this money and time on a design that's going nowhere. So the trade day really helps just protect a bit against that happening and talk a bit big ballpark budgeting too.
Speaker 2:I'm doing a training. It's just a quick 90 minute training. Come, come and join me. It'll be really good. I feel like it's such an impactful part of my design process. But if you want the full rounded design process, I have an eight step process that I have developed and refined over the years. We're meeting up in person in Melbourne or Sydney. We're doing one day of just unpacking it all and we're talking about fees and pricing and all that good stuff. But if you want to get in touch, just shoot me an email or jump onto the Design Society website. All right back to how to nail your furniture scheme.
Speaker 2:So today I want to share with you by myself which feels really weird without Bree here, to be honest. I want to start with number one, which is starting with a floor plan. And okay, it might not be the most glamorous way to start this off, but really I think it's when I have seen this fall down so many times. So both when I worked as a I just graduated and I worked for an interior decorator and we ordered a sofa I think it was about three and a half meters long. It fit the space according to the floor plan. The manufacturer of the sofa, he, kept saying are you sure this is right? We're like yep, yep, yep, sure, sure, sure. I think you know what's going to come next. So we go out to the site and the renovation has been almost completed and we're just checking over things and we realized an extra step which meant that the sofa didn't fit. So it wasn't showed on the floor plan. But something happened I don't don't remember what an extra step needed to be included in the staircase, which pushed that staircase out and, and needless to say, the sofa did not fit.
Speaker 2:So what do you do? You can't just shave a bit off. So these are the things that a floor plan you know we can help with. I mean things like that kind of a bit of a crazy thing, but I think that's always stayed in my mind. Just make sure you start with a floor plan.
Speaker 2:And if you aren't used to reading a floor plan, that's okay. You can use that blue painter's tape and map out your space to get a sense of the scale of things. And if you're a bit more familiar with the floor plan, it could be as simple as one centimeter on your ruler equals 50 centimeters. Half a meter. It gets a little complicated to explain in a podcast. Half a meter it gets a little complicated to explain in a podcast, but it is as simple as literally cutting out little shapes and moving them around your floor plan. So I mean, as interior designers we have software. That kind of gets a little bit more complicated than that, but I guess I'm just trying to encourage you to really map it out before you start ordering things, because I've seen so many projects just totally derailed by like these gigantic furniture pieces or even things that are too small. That can be a big mistake too.
Speaker 2:So, number two I want to talk about balance and scale and proportion, which kind of flows on from that. So if you're designing your floor plan, it can be quite tricky because often we have these open plan living spaces, which means that there are no walls that separate the dining, the living, the kitchen, etc. We have to use furniture placement to create those spaces. It's actually a little bit harder than it seems, and I've worked with clients that have really struggled with this, because it's quite hard to create a conversational sort of space that's easy to be in all together. So what I would say is that we need to think about balance, scale and proportion.
Speaker 2:You don't want it to feel a bit off, so you want your home to feel like Goldilocks lives there. Not too big, not too small, just right. A big sofa can be great, but you don't want to balance it with a really tiny coffee table or the worst one, which is the postage stamp size rug underneath the coffee table, and with a huge sofa. It just feels off. You want your rug to go under the legs of the sofa, things like that. Also think about negative space. So that means that sometimes you want to push the sofa out from the wall and have a bit of space behind there to bring the furniture in, to create more of a conversational kind of arrangement. You don't want it feeling like a doctor's waiting room with all the furniture pushed hard up against the edges around the walls. You want to let that space breathe and maybe sometimes it doesn't make sense to bring a sofa in from a wall, especially if it's a small space. But it could be just putting a console table behind the sofa as a nice way to put a lamp, a ledge to display artwork, or even just put your glass of wine, or something I would encourage you to think about when you're arranging the furniture.
Speaker 2:Think about a life in the day of you, a day in the life of you. That's what I wanted to say. What does your day look like? Or how do you want to live in your space? What happens when you come home with the groceries? Where do you put the groceries down? Or do you flick your shoes off? Or where do the kids put their school bags? Do you entertain? Literally? How many bums on seats do we need to accommodate here? Just think about how you want to be using that. Where are the kids going to be doing their homework? How are you going to be in the kitchen looking through, like all of those kind of things you want the space to revolve around how you want to live. So that's how I would sort of approach that from my point of view as an interior designer. But you know, you can kind of think about those things yourself as well. Number three would be think about a focal point like a hero piece.
Speaker 2:I feel like every room needs like an anchor, and sometimes, unfortunately, that means it's the TV. Probably don't really want that. It's not great for atmosphere, is it Having a big black box on the wall? So how can we work with that? Well, we can look at creating an opportunity for an incredible artwork. Or it could be a console table or a sideboard with a really beautiful carved texture to the front of it. Or it could be a rug that has a really gorgeous pattern that just draws the eye and creates a really dynamic feeling.
Speaker 2:Or what about a dining table? I love dining tables because I really think they should be the heart of the home. I know we talk about kitchens being heart of the home in Australia a lot, but I feel like the dining table should have a bit of a revival because that's where we can stop, come together, enjoy a meal. Usually, I guess that's dinner time, isn't it? Sometimes it's a bit hectic in the mornings to all sit down and have breakfast like what they do on TV. A warm, cooked breakfast every morning is quite a big ask, isn't it? But coming around the dinner table for dinner every night, and if the dining table is really a great fit for the space, a convivial space, you're sort of drawn to it, even for the breakfasts and the lunches and the kids' homework. So I love that idea of a dining table being the hero of the space, if not the whole home.
Speaker 2:Number four would be textures, materials and color. So you know those rooms. They just feel really good and you feel like you just want to spend a lot of time there, have a look at those images or observe the spaces that you're in. A lot of the time it's because of texture. It's like seeing a timber next to a velvet grass next to stone or linen next to a glossy ceramic. That contrast of texture. It's exciting for the eye and it also feels good tactile. You want to go and touch it.
Speaker 2:This is why we want to avoid that whole set of matching furniture. So we don't want to see two three-seater lounges in leather plus a armchair in leather. It's too much of the same material. You want to mix a fabric sofa with a leather sofa and maybe some steel legs on an armchair or something like that. It's about having those contrasting textures and also with color as well. It can be tricky to know how to coordinate those colors, but you can use a few techniques. Create a mood board, create a mood board in Canva and put those items of furniture side by side on a piece of paper so you can see how they look next to each other. Collect the material, swatches, the fabrics, see how they go with the timber flooring or with the stone, with other things that are already set in the space.
Speaker 2:And I suppose I would lean into choosing two or three colors and repeat them in the space. I don't think it needs to be matching. It's not about creating that matching show. It's more of that coordination. I would also encourage you to explore a bit of pattern, and I know that can really freak people out talking about pattern, but it is so incredible how much just a little bit of an impactful pattern can make a space feel dynamic and a bit more memorable and a bit more exciting than solid colors everywhere. And again, it could be in a rug, could be in a couple of cushions. I've got this diagonal stripy cushion. I absolutely love it and it feels it gives the room a real lift. It's quite, it's quite cool.
Speaker 2:And number five would be lighting. So I mean, bree and I we bang on about how much we just love lighting in a space, but you really need to think about it when you're planning your space, even as a new build. So I met a lovely lady the other day for a consultation and it was so cool to see on her floor plan of the house she hasn't even built yet. There was a floor box right in the middle of the living room and what that is. It's just basically a power point underneath the floor with a little lid and you can run up a cord. The rug can sit on top or the furniture can sit on top and all you see is the lamp in the middle of that living area. So it's a really great way to do it and sometimes it's too late. So if you haven't planned out the furniture on your floor plan of your new build, it's too late once the slab is poured to figure out that you need a power point in the middle of that living area. Or once all the plaster's up to put that wall light on the wall that you want to create that really lovely soft glow, or even just the power points where you want them to be in the corner of the room to create a nice little corner with a floor lamp. So it really pays to think about how you want to live in the space before you build or renovate. So there you go.
Speaker 2:It's just me, so it's a bit of a shorter episode. It feels so funny. I miss you, bree. I hope your voice is coming back.
Speaker 2:So number one floor plan first. Number two is balance, that scale and proportion. Number three is choose your hero piece. Number four textures and color materials. And number five lighting. So I feel like if you can think about those things, it makes your room feel less like a random assortment of stuff that you just bought online over one weekend or something and you want it to feel more curated, designed and livable, which means it's going to take more than one weekend to pull this together. It could take months to get your space feeling right, and sometimes it's just an involving thing. It doesn't have to have an end date, but, yes, if you are stuck on all of this and you would like some help, brie and I offer separately our own consultation services, and we also do full scope interior design as well.
Speaker 2:That's all for today, though. Thanks for listening, and we hopefully both will be back next week. We have some cool guests lined up as well and have a beautiful week. We've got the utmost respect for the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. They're the OG custodians of this unceded land and its waters, where we set up shop, create and call home and come to you. From this podcast today, a big shout out to all of the amazing elders who have walked before us, those leading the way in the present and the emerging leaders who will carry the torch into the future. We're just lucky to be on this journey together.