Drafting the Furniture Plan

• Now that you’ve drafted the floor plan with all its partition and dimensional information, you can begin to draft a furniture plan focusing on the furniture, furnishings and equipment.

• Start by cleaning up the floor plan (eliminate the dimensions and room names) and redraft the plan (walls, windows, doors, cabinetry, appliances and fixtures).

• Next, begin to sketch in some rough possible layouts into each room, taking into consideration circulation flow and the geometry, axial features and characteristics of the rooms.

• You may make some sectional or elevational sketches to help you understand plan dimensions (as indicated above).

• You may refer to your own experience (learn to walk around with a tape measure and a sketch book), or pattern books when drafting individual pieces of furniture.

• You may also refer to catalogs of favorite furniture manufacturers, as they often include the dimensions (and images) you will need to draft the furniture accurately.

• Additional resource reference books, such as Time Saver Standards, Interior Design Graphic Standards and Architectural Graphic Standards are also very useful in gathering specific design information regarding a wide range of modern and historical furniture and furnishings.

• There are numerous design reference books (see this week’s handouts) that illustrate planning criteria, such as this illustration from “Residential Interior Design: A Guide to Planning Spaces”. Hint: consider logical, clear circulation, the focus, or foci, of a room, the geometry of a room, any axis (or axes) of a room.

• Once the selections are made and the arrangement sketched out, you can begin to draft into place the furniture layouts and give detail to the characteristics of the individual pieces of furniture or furnishings (chair arms, backs, upholstery details, tufting, material indications, etc.).

• Note also the relative range of line weights in distinguishing walls from furniture.

• The more linework you employ in the development of a furniture plan, the more it may become beneficial to use poché for the walls of the plan in order to set off the floor plan partitions from the furniture and furnishing elements within the plan.

• Note how this pochéd version of the furniture pops at a glance as compared to the unpochéd version on the previous page.

• Compare the two plans here, one with poché and one without, and see how the floor plan pops more with the poché. All the furnishing linework calls for the use of pochéto make the plan read more clearly.

• Note the jogged section reference marker to indicate the longitudinal section, which will be drafted next on a separate sheet.