I Tried West Elm’s Free Planning Tool for My Living Room (It Saves So Much Time!)
As a single woman living alone, there’s a lot I’ve had to teach myself. I can build furniture, use power tools, and unclog a drain all while perfecting a five-step skincare routine. Sometimes my hyper-independence results in me deciding to assemble a gigantic couch late at night, only to get my Ruggable rug in the mail two days later — and immediately want to roll it out under the couch. Then I wake up the next morning and realize I did a terrible job placing the rug and want to redo it all again.
What I’ve learned from living alone is that if I’m going to be moving huge pieces of furniture by myself, I better do it right the first time to avoid Googling “how to lift bed frame one person” on the regular. So when I moved from my studio apartment into my first one-bedroom, I realized I needed a game plan for laying out my space. That’s where West Elm’s Room Planner came in. If you’re not familiar, the brand’s Design Crew Room Planner is essentially like The Sims for designing room layouts — and all you need is a measuring tape.
To get started, you measure the dimensions of your room, add those dimensions into the system, and then it produces a to-scale floor plan of your space. From there, you can start digitally trying out furniture in the room, moving items around to see how they’ll look.
What’s fun is that under the “Products” tab in the tool, you have access to West Elm’s entire catalog of furniture to play around with. You can browse through the brand’s couches, coffee tables, and media consoles to see what goes well together visually and if these items hang together spatially in your room.
So if you’ve been considering sizing up your sofa or rug, this is an easy way to envision how it will look without the hassle of buying and potentially having to return an oversized item. You can also change the color and finish of the furniture you pick, too, so you can see how everything will look together.
The best part about the tool, though, is you don’t have to have West Elm furniture at all or make any purchase to use it (note: You do have to create an account to access it, but that’s free). I tried it for my living room, and I don’t have anything major from West Elm in there. What actually kicked off my experiment with the tool was that I finally found Albany Park’s gorgeous olive green Kova Sofa at a huge discount on Facebook Marketplace after eyeing it for over a year. It’s so comfortable, and I love it, but that couch takes up a lot of space. So I knew I wouldn’t want to be shuffling it around on my hardwood floors.
With the Room Planner, I was able to find a similarly sized (and olive colored) sectional in West Elm’s catalog, which I placed in my digital living room along one of the long walls (my room is essentially a rectangle, and it didn’t make sense on the narrower wall opposite or either of the shorter walls). From there, I turned my attention to rug size. Again, I wasn’t going to go with a West Elm rug necessarily, but since rugs are standardly sized, I grabbed a design to determine what would fit best. After playing around with a few sizes, I realized anything under 8×10 feet would be too small compared to the size of the couch — but anything much bigger would take up the entire room.
To pull in some of the green tones of the couch and tie into the floral theme of my Etsy artwork, I decided on the 8’x10′ Morris & Co. Blackthorn Ivory Tufted Rug from Ruggable, which ended up being the perfect size — just as the similar placeholder rug looked on the Room Planner!
Once the sofa placement and rug size were set, the Room Planner made it easy to figure out what I wanted to complete the rest of the space, mainly a media console, shoe cabinet, accent chair, coffee table, and a record player stand. Again, I do a lot of secondhand shopping on Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp, so I don’t always know where everything I purchase is originally from. Regardless, I was able to use similar pieces in the West Elm catalog to give me a sense of scale and how everything would look in the room.
Another hack here? If you can’t find a piece of furniture from West Elm that’s similar enough to something you have or want, you’re given the option to add generic furniture in the “Add Ons” tab. I ended up doing this for the shoe cabinet and record player, so I at least had a strong game plan for where everything would go even if the dimensions I was working with there weren’t perfect.
So whether you’ve just moved or you’re looking to shake up your space, West Elm’s Room Planner is a great way to play around with furniture placement without all of the heavy lifting. I’ve already started using it for my bedroom, too! Now I just need a version that creates gallery walls!
Further Reading
We Tested (and Rated!) All the Sofas at Ashley — Here Are the Best to Suit Your Style and Space
We Asked 8 Pro Travelers What They Never Pack in Their Carry-On, and Here’s What They Said
