Rooms · Gather · 12 min read · Updated September 2026

The living room

The room with the most people and the most light. The hall of the courtyard house and the room that keeps its shape, the centre of the plan, seating with a back and the distances at which people talk, the room’s three ends and where the screen goes, and the light of the south.

Oriented S 180°

Fire

Fig. 01 A long table, a bench, a wall behind. The arrangement the tradition wants for any room in which people sit together.

If the bedroom is the most yin room and the kitchen the most yang, the living room is where the two meet: bright enough to be sociable, settled enough to stay in. The tradition wants it central, well lit, and arranged so that the people in it have their backs covered and their faces toward one another. It has one modern problem, the screen, and one old solution, which is to arrange the room around the people and let the screen find a wall. The old solution is older than it looks: it is the plan of the hall the tradition was written in.

The hall the tradition gathered in

Fig. 01 The hall, and the room that keeps its shape. A: the tang of a courtyard house, on the north side of the court and open to it through a wall of lattice doors on the south. Against the north wall, the wall of honour, stands the long altar table with the ancestors’ tablets; before it the square table, the table of the eight immortals, with the two armchairs of the host and the guest of honour either side, facing the court and the door; along the east and west walls the guests’ chairs in pairs, a tea table between each pair, facing one another across the open centre. B: the same room today. The sofa has the wall of honour and faces the door; the armchairs have the sides; the low table has the open centre; the screen has a side wall, where a seated eye finds it without the room being arranged round it; and the window has the south, where the court was. The living room the tradition wants is the hall with the furniture changed. The hall arrangement follows Knapp’s survey of the old dwellings and Wang Shixiang’s catalogue of the furniture; the pieces are drawn at their classic sizes, the altar table three metres long and the square table a metre square. The seating etiquette, host facing the door with the wall of honour behind and guests ranked outward from the host along the sides, is the command position as a rule of manners.

The living room of the Chinese house was the tang, the hall, and it stood in the most honoured place of the courtyard house: on the north side of the court, facing south over it, its whole south wall a row of lattice doors that were folded open by day so that the hall and the court were one room. Against its north wall, the wall of honour, stood a long narrow altar table with the tablets of the ancestors and, on festivals, their offerings; before it a square table, the table of the eight immortals, with an armchair either side for the host and the guest of honour, both facing the court and the door. Along the east and west walls stood the guests’ chairs in pairs, each pair with a small tea table between, facing one another across an open floor. Knapp’s survey of the old dwellings finds the arrangement from Beijing to Guangdong with the furniture changing and the plan not, and Wang Shixiang’s catalogue gives the pieces.

The centre of the plan

The Lo Shu square has a centre, the number five, Earth, and the tradition asks that the centre of a house be stable, open and unobstructed: not a bathroom, not a staircase, not a store. Where the plan allows, the living room is the room to put there, or at least the room from which the centre is reached. A house whose middle is a cupboard is read as a house with a weak heart, and it is also, in practice, a house with a dark middle. The same rule holds inside the room: its centre, the taiji of the plan, is kept open, and the seats gather round it, as the hall’s open floor lay between its two rows of chairs.

Plan 02 The living room: the main seat backed, the chairs at its sides, the centre kept open, and the screen to the side The door comes in from the hall at the bottom left. The sofa has the top wall behind it and sees the door; two armchairs close the circle from the sides, the way the dragon and tiger ridges close a site. The centre of the room is left open. The hearth, the hatched block, is on the left wall, the light comes from the right, the table for eating sits where the light reaches, the two red dots are the lamps, one by the seat and one in the corner daylight does not reach, and the screen sits on the bottom wall where the seated eye can find it without the room being arranged around it.

Seating with a back

Arrange the seats as the Form school arranged a site. The main sofa against a solid wall, facing the room and, if possible, the door. Chairs to either side like the dragon and tiger ridges. The open ground of the classical site becomes the low table and the space around it. Nobody sits with their back to the door, and nobody sits in the line of it. The sofa placement guide draws the main seat alone and in the sitting circle; this page draws the whole room around it.

Fig. 03 Three seating plans. A: the corner group, a sofa and two chairs at right angles with the walls behind them, in which everyone sees everyone across a corner and nobody has their back to the room. B: facing pairs across a low table, two and a half to three metres apart, with a wall or a solid piece behind each. C, ghosted: the row, sofa and chairs in a line facing a screen, in which nobody sees anyone and the seats at the ends have the room at their backs. The tradition asks for backs covered and the door in view; the seating studies ask for people at an angle to one another, close enough to talk. A and B satisfy both. C is what most living rooms drift into, and the arrangement that Osmond and Sommer called sociofugal.

The three plans are the ones the room has to choose between. The corner group, A, is the Form school’s site at the scale of a sofa: two walls behind, the room in front, everyone at an angle to everyone else. Facing pairs, B, work when the pieces are close enough to talk across, which the seating studies put at under three metres, and when each has something solid behind. The row, C, is what a television makes of a room if nobody resists it, and the remedy is not to remove the screen but to turn one seat.

The room’s three ends

The classical hall had a host’s seat facing the door, guests along the sides, and a wall of honour behind; the living room keeps the shape with different furniture. It has three ends the tradition asks to be told apart: the seat, where people are; the hearth, which was the fire and is now a fireplace, a stove or the wall the eye rests on; and the light, the window end, where a table can be read at and a plant can live. The plan above gives each its place. Alexander’s pattern for the fire says why the hearth matters even where nothing burns in it: a room needs one place the eye can rest that is not a person and not a screen, and a fireplace, a stove, a wall of books or a single large picture will do.

Light and the south

In the northern hemisphere the living room wants the south or the west, the sunniest and warmest elevations, and the classical house was planned that way: the hall faced south because the court was its light and its warmth, and the lattice doors were the whole wall opened to it. The problem of a south room is glare and heat in summer; the tradition’s answer, Earth to steady Fire, translates as heavy matte materials, warm neutrals and something to shade the window. A north living room gets even light and no sun; warm it with Fire and Earth, a fireplace or a lamp, clay and wool, rather than with more glass. The lighting guide draws the lamps: one beside the seat, one in the dark corner, one over the table, and the ceiling light off.

The five phases in one room

The living room is where the Five Elements are most often read as a set, because it contains more things than any other room. A typical contemporary living room is Metal and Water heavy, white walls, glass, screens, hard floors, and short of Earth and Wood. The correction is not more objects but different ones: one tall plant, one low heavy table, one warm lamp. The colour guide gives the families; the plants guide gives the corner.

In order

Seat first, against the wall that sees the door. Then the chairs, at the sides and turned in, within talking distance. Then the centre, kept open. Then the light, where the table and the plant will be. Then the hearth, or the wall that stands for it. Then the screen, to the side. The dining room page takes the table when it needs a room of its own.