The Coffee Table: Your Guide to Choosing the Perfect One
COFFEE TABLES
The Coffee Table is an essential piece of your living room or great room. It serves so many purposes. It's a table for drinks, snacks, books, or the TV remote. It is sometimes used as a desk or even a foot stool (although not at MY mother’s house). The coffee table can also serve to tie all your seating pieces together to make a more unified, cohesive look. It will add style, colour, texture or an interesting geometry to your project.
There are so many options when it comes to something as simple as a coffee table. You have different styles from modern to traditional, rustic to coastal, the list goes on. You can use different shapes, square, oval, round, triangle etc. You can even use have specific functions i.e. upholstered ottoman with or without casters, lift top tables with ergonomic designs, or storage tables.
With so many choices of wood, glass, and man-made alternatives, how do you decide? Personally, I just let Michael Miller choose our designs and I know we can't go wrong (HA). We have compiled some examples below to help inspire some fresh ideas and make it easy to find the right fit for your space.
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COFFEE TABLE SIZE AND SHAPE GUIDE
Height Ergonomically speaking, the ideal height for your coffee table should be an inch or two lower than the seat height item.
Length A good rule of thumb is to make the length of your coffee table approximately one half to two-thirds the length of a standard sofa. If your sofa has a chaise, the same rule would apply using the length of the straight seating section before the chaise.
Shape There are many shapes and sizes available for your coffee table: round, oval, square, rectangle, octagon and so on. Certain shapes pair well with specific types of seating arrangements. Generally, a standard-length sofa (82-92”) looks nice with an oval or a rectangle coffee table. There are some very versatile nesting coffee tables that can be very handy in places where you do not have enough room for the full length of table that you would really like.
Placement Many people ask us how far the coffee table should be from their seating...and how much space should be left for traffic. A space of 18-20” is ample between a stationary sofa and a coffee table.