Achieving the Perfect Balance: Mastering Scale & Proportion in Interior Design

2-Minute Read

Scale and proportion are a crucial consideration in an interior designer’s planning process. It’s about understanding the fundamentals of size, shape and placement, from paint through to your small furnishings. Finding the correct scale in your design can either create space with consistency and harmony, or make it feel unbalanced. Beautiful interior designs will create a particular feeling or emotion when you walk into the space and mastering this art begins with successful planning and an understanding of how particular fixtures are pieced together. We’ve put together some professional insight to help you keep balance and order in your interior designs.

When Selecting Furniture, Size & Scale Matter

Scale is considered as early as furniture plotting in our designs. This is because picking the wrong size for your furniture can make the room feel overcrowded or too sparse.

Start by measuring the overall dimensions of your room. Note any key areas of your space, including structural elements. This will help inform your decisions when selecting the pieces you would like to add, as you now have an understanding of your space and what you can do with it.

Once we have this, you want to make sure that you keep the scale for the rest of the furniture around it relatively similar. For example, having an extra large sofa and small coffee table will exaggerate your proportions in the wrong way; the best thing is to opt for something that is either both on the larger size or smaller sizes together, depending on the room you have.

Don’t forget to consider your ceiling height too. If you have low ceilings, work with furniture that sits lower to the ground to help give the balance to overhead heights. This will make a space feel bigger. In reverse, if we have higher ceilings, you can lower your main light source. Drop a pendant to a lower height to help create a more intimate space.

Draw Your Eye to a Focal Point of Your Space

Picking the focus of any room and building around it is a perfect way to get proportion and scale. Having that focus gives us something to tie the room together.

This can be done with a statement sofa with a bold print or a captivating sculpture in your entrance hall. That focal point will now impact everything else, and we can build the room around this.

To give proportion to a room, you should surround it with pieces that complement the focal piece and not take away from it. For example, you may want to use a mantelpiece as your focal point and place a striking piece of art above it. This will enhance your artwork as the mantle will frame the piece and give a grander feel to it.

Finding Harmony Through Void Space & Ratio

Leaving room for your furniture to breathe will help make your room feel like it has more space. Using the floor space as the example, you want to have no more than 60% of the room footprint to consist of furniture and the other 40% be empty. This is to be left for natural paths and walkways to form and keep the space from looking too busy.

When it comes to wall space, try leaving room around your hung items; it will make them feel grander if there is blank space around them (just remember to consider sizing when placing this on the wall). There is a sense of luxury when achieving all this, resulting in a well-curated and planned space.

Consistency Through Shapes, Colours & Patterns  

Now you have all the basics figured out, let’s talk patterns and shapes, as it’s the perfect way to keep the proportions right in your space. By doing this, you can create cohesiveness between different elements in your room, whether it’s structural or something like soft furnishings this will help you link them and solidify their place in the room while keeping their unique character.

Using a repeated shape and colours can help create balance and provide consistency. Great examples are if you have brass hardware in your space and you pair this with brass furnishings or by placing square artwork on the walls with square tiles on the floor. This creates a subtle way to tie small and large elements of a room together.

From something that was a singular entity, we created a group formed by shape, giving synergy to your interior. If you do find a shape, don’t go overboard trying to match everything. This should just be done to add to the balance, not overwhelm. The same rules apply to patterns as well.

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