This Designer’s “Puzzle Trick” Will Help You Pick Out Furniture That Fits the Flow of the Room

To design a harmonious space, you have to think about both small details and the big picture. That means that good design is not just about filling a room with individual pieces that look nice, but also making sure everything in the room works together—and, more importantly, that the design works with the architecture of your space. That can be a pretty big task to take on, especially if you’re working within the constraints of a room with awkward corners, nooks, or curved walls. But, there are a few simple things you can do to ensure your room has a good flow to it—and Jason Saft, RS Home designer and owner of Staged to Sell Home, a luxury staging firm based in NYC and Brooklyn, taught us his tricks.

The “Puzzle Trick” for Fixing the Flow of a Room

For the 2025 REAL SIMPLE Home, Saft had the challenge of designing an open-concept living room that, on one end, opened up into the kitchen, and on the other end, featured curved walls with floor-to-ceiling windows and a sliding glass door out to the terrace. So, he couldn’t just push a bunch of furniture up against the walls and call it a day. He had to think about the flow of the room and how the furniture could work with, rather than against, that flow.

The answer? Curved furniture. “[W]hen you have rounded walls and curves, you do really want to think about rounded furniture,” Saft says. “We see this a lot, where there’ll be a curve and there’s just a typical straight sofa and a square rectangle rug—and it feels off.”

For this reason, Saft says he made a conscious choice to go for furniture with curved edges in the living room—including a bean-shaped sofa, rounded club chairs, and an oval coffee table—so that it would complement the curved architecture surrounding it. “It’s almost like doing a puzzle,” he says. “A square doesn’t fit inside the rounded edge as well.”

Once you’ve picked out the larger, foundational pieces that match the flow of the room, Saft says you can play around with different shapes for the secondary pieces, like the chairs and side tables, to bring in more contrast.

The Trick for Filling Up a Large Wall

Large walls can be intimidating to decorate, especially if you don’t have a large budget to match. Filling up oversized wall space can sometimes require custom furniture to span the length of the wall and avoid that shrunken furniture effect that happens when you use pieces that are too small for the space.

As an alternative solution to this design challenge, Saft says he will often use two consoles pushed together to fake the look of a large, custom furniture piece. “I think it’s just a really great trick for people to think about when they have a larger space and they can’t afford custom furniture,” he says.

Then, Saft recommends creating a gallery wall with artwork and dressing up the consoles with books, accent pieces, and lamps (just as he did when designing the dining room for the REAL SIMPLE Home). Want another way to fill wall space? Check out RS Home designer Mandy Cheng’s checkerboard wall treatment.

The Trick for Decorating Awkward Spaces

Another common design challenge is figuring out what to do with awkward nooks or jutted-out walls that seem to disrupt the flow of a space. These are the kinds of areas that end up getting posted on Reddit with the question, “What would you do with this space?” And, often, they’re just left empty.

Saft’s trick to bring these spaces back into the design conversation within your home is to utilize gallery pedestals. “I think everyone should have like one of those,” he says. “There’s no better way to elevate an object than to put it on a gallery pedestal,” Saft says. “It’s a great space to anchor a gallery pedestal object and then put art above it.”