Many people look for sofa tables to enhance their living rooms and the elegant furnishings that are often found in their more formal living areas. The formal nature of the table allows it to blend with the sofas and sofa sets or chairs you may have. The main uses are to provide a visual barrier perhaps to stop the eye from looking beyond the sofa for example to the dining room behind the person sitting on the sofa or to feature a collection of some sort.
Sofa tables are wider than console tables and typically longer as well. This lends the surface to being an appropriate place to place a number of objects. Small sculptures, a variety of sizes of photographs, elements of your tea cup collection, vases and many other objects. The purpose of a sofa table is to give height to important objects whether they are pictures of your children, family heirlooms or ceramic pieces you collected from a street vendor on your trip through the Czech Republic.
All sofa tables can also be used to create a visual barrier. If your living room flows into your dining room, it can be difficult for the person facing the dining room to focus on the person sitting on the sofa. Instead of waving your arms around trying to get his attention, put a visual barrier in place to encourage his focus on you. The easiest way to do that is to take a beautiful Chinese screen 24 to 36 inches high and place it on the sofa table. Your guest or spouse will have a shorter distance focal point, the screen, which will encourage his eye back to you. It helps with conversation tremendously.
The wide open space is too distracting for most of us. Another choice for bringing the focal point back to the person on the sofa is to place a couple of vases with tall plants in them. If the vases are an oval footprint and short, you can place two vases on the sofa table. Make sure the plants or dried twigs are at least two feet above the height of the sofa top. I prefer to have clients use 3, 4 or 5 vases that are more slender but provide enough width that a viewer will draw his or her eye up the side of the vase and then to the choice of plant above. After reviewing the vases and plants the person facing you will be able to comfortably focus on you. Leaving the space behind you open only encourages your conversation partner to look beyond you.
Another favorite use for sofa tables is in the office, home and otherwise. Sofa tables are inherently more feminine than executive desks. My motto is, if I can not lift it, I don’t want it in my office. Big bulky executive desks are dowdy and boring. Show some personality in the office by bringing two sofa tables to create an L-shaped desk. It is amazing how much larger your office will feel. If you are using them in a home office, it keeps your home office from feeling like a mismatched portion of your house. Simply find the complimentary style to your home furnishings in a sofa table form. No room is complete without a sofa table.
