HOME IMPROVEMENT : Interior Traffic Jams Can Be Tastefully Avoided With Planning : One way to avert gridlock, designers say, is to forgo placing furniture against walls. Recessed lighting offers maximum floor-plan flexibility.

Have you ever stubbed your toe on your way to the kitchen for a midnight snack and then cursed the rocking chair that seemed to leap out in front of you?

Have you ever felt like you were doing “the wave” in your family room, bobbing up and down as you tried to watch the Super Bowl around a parade of people passing in front of the television along the only route in and out of the kitchen?

If so, you have a traffic problem, and you need to rearrange your furniture.

This may seem like an obvious statement, but interior designers say the solutions aren’t that obvious to a lot of people.

The placement of furniture to allow and encourage a free flow of traffic through a house requires creativity and a knowledge of simple design principles.

Sometimes it requires having enough nerve to fly in the face of conventional furniture layouts. Designers say the placement of furniture can be used to direct traffic around activity areas, creating artificial walls.

Interior designers say that traffic paths through a home should be at least 36 inches wide and should flow through the house without interfering with conversation or other activities. That means there should be a minimum of three feet between pieces of furniture or between pieces of furniture and the wall, if the furniture is floated--arranged in groupings away from the wall. This allows people to move safely, especially in emergencies.

Other considerations when planning traffic patterns include not placing furniture with sharp corners or protruding legs near traffic paths and making sure that electrical cords for lamps and such won’t be tripped over.

One way to avoid dangling electrical cords is to have recessed lighting in the ceiling, according to Dorian Hunter of Dorian Hunter Interiors in Fullerton. This allows more freedom with furniture arrangement and also provides lighting that may be focused on an artwork or other focal points in a room.

When placing a coffee table with sharp corners, consider where it will be located.

“So often, people tend to put their furniture in what we call obvious places,” Hunter says.

Many people tend to put all their furniture against the wall because they think that’s the way it should be, while creating groupings that are away from the wall is really a more attractive arrangement, Hunter says.

Mary Swift of Swift Interiors in Laguna Hills agrees. “One thing that happens sometimes is that we are traditionally oriented toward placing the furniture around the perimeter of the room, and what happens when you do that is all the traffic is right through the middle of the conversation,” she says. “If it’s going to float out in the room, and people are going to try to get into an L-shaped sectional and you have sharp corners on the coffee table, everybody is going to bang their knees and shins and swear at that coffee table until you get rid of it.”

To resolve this problem, Swift suggests analyzing each room. Sit back and look at the doors and windows and draw an imaginary line where people might be entering and leaving the room and wherever they might be walking back and forth. Then note the focal points in the room and see if the lines go through a conversation area or another activity area. If so, furniture rearranging is in order.

What are some other common mistakes that people make when arranging furniture?

“I like the old saying by a famous architect--less is more,” says Christine Hallen-Berg of Robinson Hallen-Berg, a Laguna Beach interior design firm. “I think that sometimes people tend to just put furniture in to fill up walls and it may look out of place.”

Hallen-Berg suggests drawing up a floor plan at a scale of 1/4-inch to 1 foot. Be sure to include all doorways, windows (including how high off the floor they are), built-in cabinets, fireplaces and electrical outlets. Then you can take some paper and draw your furniture to scale, cut out the furniture and experiment with different ways to arrange it.

The key, designers say, is to allow for the 36-inch pathways first, and then arrange the furniture.

Interior designers always work from a floor plan, offering clients suggestions of furniture and its placement, both with new pieces and existing furniture.

“I love to float a sofa in a room. I even float beds in master bedrooms,” Hallen-Berg says.

“Designers often float furniture out in the middle of the room and use the furniture to create kind of artificial walls,” Swift adds.

“By doing so, you can direct people to walk out around, outside of your conversation area, rather than right through the middle,” she suggests.

“I’m working on a home right now where the master bedroom is beautiful; it’s not that large but there is a wonderful view of the ocean,” Hallen-Berg says. “So, we’re floating the bed in the room, so that when they are in bed, they can take advantage of the view. We’re not doing it on the traditional bed wall.

“I just think that a lot of people . . . don’t think that they should or can do such a thing,” Hallen-Berg says. “It takes creativity and I guess it takes bravery or guts, visualization. Some people can’t visualize something and some people are stuck in the mode of what is the typical thing to do.”

Floating furniture is especially handy with the open interior designs that are now popular in Southern California homes, according to architect Rick Crane of Belair-Crane Design Group in Fullerton.

“A popular style today, for instance, is to have kitchens open to family rooms, he says. The rooms are no longer really separate spaces because doors have been eliminated.

Typically, he says, the only interior doors to be found in homes being built today are in bedrooms and baths. And even some master bedrooms are open to the adjoining baths, especially if there’s a fireplace or a spa tub.

“Large spaces are one thing that some people look at and say, ‘How am I going to furnish this house?’ ” he says. Floating furniture groupings to create artificial walls is the answer to this problem, he says--to create conversation spaces, entertainment spaces or circulation spaces.

This may require a change in thinking, he says, but “then you can start floating furniture and directing traffic.”

Hunter used a brass and marble room divider to direct traffic in a Fullerton home she worked on. The room divider kept people from stepping off an 18-inch drop between the living room and the dining room and directed them to two steps down to the dining room.

In the kitchen of that home, chairs can be pushed all the way under the counter for even more space, or removed entirely so the counter can be used as a buffet.

In the upstairs master bedroom, a chest of drawers was used as a room divider between the bed area and a sitting area. The sofa and chairs in the sitting area were placed in the middle of the room, and then the chest of drawers was placed at the bottom of the wide steps up to the bed area, creating a passageway on each side, rather than one wide stairway.

How much thought do architects give to traffic patterns and furniture placement when designing homes?

“Quite a bit of thought goes into how the place will furnish,” says architect Crane. With a view home, he says, an architect will try to create windows toward the view and locate the fireplace in the same area. This way, furniture groupings can be placed facing the view and the fireplace, to take advantage of the beauty of both elements, he says.

In bedrooms, he tries to have at least two walls on which a bed could be placed to provide more flexibility. But he says windows pretty well dictate how this will go, especially since a walk-in closet or an entry to a large bath may have already reduced possible wall space.

However, interior designers say that they prefer to be consulted during the design phase of a house. That’s because sometimes, they say, homes may have beautiful design details but offer limited furniture-placement options.

Hunter recently had a prospective client interested in furniture-placement ideas for a 5,000-square-foot home. Hunter looked at the blueprints and found that much of the space was taken up with passageways and interior columns. And the rooms, she found, were “minuscule.”

The client wanted to put a grand piano in the living room. Hunter explained to her that if she did that, the only other furniture that the room could accommodate would be a sofa and two chairs. This essentially would turn the living room into a music room, Hunter suggested.

This isn’t the first time she’s seen this problem--lots of space yet no real place to put things.

“I’ve seen houses where there is no place to put a sofa,” she says.

Corner fireplaces can also present problems. They are attractive, but Hunter says it is sometimes extremely difficult to group furniture around them.

The size of rooms and furniture is another area where people get into trouble. One client called Hunter for design help after purchasing an expensive sectional sofa so big that it covered two doors in the room.

“They had a total misconception what the size of their room was,” she says. Hunter told them to return the sofa and order two, smaller custom sofas. They fit the room perfectly and allowed for a good traffic pattern.

It’s important to measure a room and make a plan before you shop for furniture.

Hunter also says custom-made furniture can solve a variety of problems because it can be tailored to fit any space. “Everything we order is custom, which does not mean it’s more expensive. But it means that you’re going to get exactly what you need,” she says.

Furniture arrangement isn’t the only traffic-pattern consideration. Floor coverings also need to be selected carefully.

In high-traffic areas, hard surfaces such as tile or wood may be best because they are durable and clean easily, Hunter says. And she doesn’t use area rugs on carpet because people tend to trip on them. Instead, she suggests leaving space for an area rug when flooring is being installed. This way, the area rug sits on the sub-flooring in a depression. It is surrounded by carpeting, wood or tile and the surface is level and less likely to cause tripping.

Slippery flooring in traffic areas should also be avoided. Hallen-Berg advises that highly polished tile is too slippery for floors. Use a tile with texture instead, and with wider-than-normal areas of grout to create better footing.

Hallen-Berg recently wanted to use granite on a kitchen floor to match counters for a home she was designing, but knew it would be too slippery. The solution, she says, was to sandblast a design into the granite floor. This created an attractive design feature, while also adding texture to the floor to make it less slippery.