Which Coffee Table is Right for My Home? These are The Answers...

Published at Sunday, July 21st 2019. by Jolanka Bauer in Coffee Table.

Whether you are selling your home and working with a professional stager, buying a new home, or simply redecorating, design choices could be overwhelming. The "right" piece is often more than dimension and style.

Often homeowners know when something 'doesn't look right' but they don't know why. This also means that they don't know how to fix it. Exasperation, along with multiple trips to furniture stores, creates something that have to be fun into an daunting experience.

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How to Have a Cool Coffee Table When You Don’t Have Room for Much Else

UNDERSTANDING THE VISUAL WEIGHT OF MATERIALS
There are so many options for materials in today's home stores. For the purpose of this post, I'll break it down into three primary elements.

#1 WOODEN COFFEE TABLES
Stains may range from blonde to ebony, but generally talking have "high visual weight". The darker the stain, the more 'visual weight' the table would have.

#2 GLASS COFFEE TABLES
Because glass is generally clear, it holds virtually no 'visual weight'. If the glass is 'smoked' or 'frosted', then visual weight increases with the darkness of color.

#3 FABRIC OTTOMANS
Spesifically, Ottomans are not coffee tables, also today they are frequently used in lieu of tables, so I am involving them. Just as with wood and glass, the darker the color, the more 'visual‐ weight' they would score.

And then, what exactly does it mean to have 'more visual weight'? When looking at the space available for furnishings and traffic flow, scale becomes very important. Not only does the designer need to consider how much floor spaces is available, but they should determine how much 'visual space' is available before the room looks cluttered or over loaded with furniture.

The larger the 'visual weight number', the more prominent that piece would appear in a room. For example, a 'dark stained wooden coffee table' would appear much larger than the same size glass coffee table.

For this reason, wooden coffee tables are 'frequently used' in spaces that are larger, or have more open space. The heavy visual weight helps to bridge furniture pieces that are far apart, or may help balance large pieces placed away from each other.

On the flip side, glass is frequently used in smaller spaces, where floor space either appears minimal, or actually is minimal.
Glass has the effect of being non‐existent in a room. You have all of the 'convenience' and 'function of a table' without visually taking‐up the room in your design. This could create a small space seem much larger.

Fabric ottomans typically work about the same way as 'wooden coffee tables', but they have the advantage of being able to be broken apart into multiple pieces, and of being left alone, without complementing.

Once you have selected the 'right material' for your coffee table, next, you'll want to determine the correct shape.

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