How-to

"Will it fit?" — answer it before the checkout, not the delivery

Guides · updated 2026-08-18

Furniture regret is almost never about style. It is a piece that technically fits — it stands where planned — but the drawer will not open fully, the walkway shrank to a shuffle, or the loft bed left less headroom than any human wants. "Will it fit?" was the wrong question. The right one: will it fit with everything it needs around it?

The clearances that actually decide it

• Walkways: 60cm is a squeeze one person accepts; 75–90cm walks comfortably; main routes through a room deserve more.
• Doors and drawers need their arc. A door swing is a quarter-circle of floor the plan must keep empty; a wardrobe or dresser needs its own depth again in front to open fully. An extending table needs its extended footprint plus chairs pulled out — roughly 75cm behind each seat.
• Seating geometry: ~40–45cm from sofa to coffee table (reachable, passable); TV distance around 1.5–2.5× the screen diagonal.
• Vertical gaps: the space above a loft bed or under a sloped ceiling. A 2.02m bookcase under a 2.4m ceiling is fine; under 2.05m it is a fight with the light fitting. Radiators eat wall depth exactly like furniture.
• The forgotten one — the delivery path: the sofa must pass the front door, the hallway turn and the stairwell before it ever reaches the room. Measure the tightest point of the route, not just the destination.

Why eyeballing fails

Showrooms run big — a sofa that looks modest in 800m² of retail space arrives enormous in a 14m² lounge. Product photos are shot wide-angle in styled rooms. And mental furniture-tetris silently drops the clearances: the mind places the box, not the box plus its door arcs and walkways. Numbers on a tape beat all of it.

The systematic check

1. Measure the room properly — clear interior distances, ceiling height, openings with their swing directions.
2. Draw it at those measurements in the planner, doors and windows included — door swings render as real arcs on the plan.
3. Place the actual products, not approximations: paste the product URL and the true-size model (or exact-dimension stand-in) lands in the room.
4. Read the gaps: distance overlays show each piece’s clearance to walls and neighbours as you drag; the measure tape checks anything else, in the plan or the 3D room.
5. For the final gut-check, walk it in VR — tightness is a feeling, and real scale at eye height is where a too-narrow walkway announces itself.

Five minutes of clearance-checking in a true-scale plan is cheaper than one return shipment — in money, and in the weekend the wrong sofa spends blocking the hallway.

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