Measuring for a corner

A corner sofa is the shape most likely to be measured wrong, and it is not because people are careless. It is because a corner is two sofas joined at a right angle, so almost every instinct you have about measuring one sofa gives you the wrong answer twice.

This is about planning the room. Getting the thing through your front door is a separate job with its own calculator on the size guide, and the last section here hands you over to it.

Why a corner is a different job

With a normal sofa you have one length to satisfy and one wall to put it against. With a corner you have two lengths, and they interact: the two arms of the L share the corner unit, so the space one arm occupies is not independent of the other.

The other thing that catches people is that a corner sofa consumes floor along both walls to its full depth. A 3+2 leaves you a walkable gap in at least one direction. An L does not — it takes a bite out of the room shaped like the room’s own corner, which is usually the most useful corner in it.

Which way round: 2c2, 2c1 and 1c2

The code tells you the shape. The c is the corner unit and the numbers are the seats along each arm — so a 2c2 is two seats, corner, two seats, and it is symmetrical. Both arms are the same length, and it does not matter which way round you put it. (The jargon article has the rest of the vocabulary.)

2c1 and 1c2 are the same sofa in mirror image. Two seats on one arm, one on the other, and the code tells you which side the long arm is on. This is the decision people make last and should make first, because it is not adjustable afterwards — you cannot swap the hand of a corner sofa once it is built, you can only turn the whole thing round, which puts the back of it where the wall used to be.

Measure the two runs, to the obstruction

Take both walls, starting from the inside of the room’s corner and measuring outwards along each one. The number you want is not wall-to-wall. It is corner to the first thing in the way, and the things in the way are almost always the same list:

• A radiator. The most common one, and it is not just about fit — see below.
• A door, and the arc it swings through. Measure to where the open door reaches, not to the frame.
• A chimney breast or alcove. Measure the narrowest part of the run, which is usually the breast rather than the alcove.
• Skirting boards. They hold the sofa 15–25mm off the wall, and on a measurement that is already tight, that is the difference.
• Sockets and switches you still need to reach with the sofa in place.

Write both numbers down before you look at any sofas. Choosing the sofa first and then measuring is how people end up talking themselves into 4cm they do not have.

The number everybody forgets

Depth. A corner sofa is roughly 90 to 95cm deep, and that depth applies to both arms — so an L in the corner of a room removes about a metre from each of two walls, not one.

In a 3.5m wide room, a corner sofa along one wall leaves about 2.5m of usable width, and the arm running down the adjacent wall takes another metre out of the length. That is the calculation people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the room still works.

For scale, the corners currently in our range run from about 190 × 240cm up to 240 × 240cm, at roughly 90 to 95cm deep. Every corner sofa product page carries its own exact figures — use those rather than these, which are here to give you a sense of the size before you start.

What has to be left over

Fitting is not the same as working. Once the footprint is on the floor, check what is left:

• A main walkway: 60cm at an absolute minimum, 75cm if it is the route through the room. Below 60cm people start turning sideways, and a route people turn sideways for is a route they stop using.
• Coffee table to the seat front: 40 to 45cm. Close enough to reach a mug without standing, far enough to get your legs past.
• Every door opens fully. Internal doors and cupboard doors both — a corner sofa parked in front of an airing cupboard is a mistake you notice weekly for years.
• At least 30cm from a radiator. This one is not about circulation. Dry localised heat cracks leather and can warp a wooden frame over a winter or two, which is in the care guide for a reason. It is also the fastest way to make a radiator useless.
• The curtains still draw and the window still opens.

If you are looking at a U-shape

A U-shape is a corner sofa with a second return, and everything above applies with an extra wall added. Ours run around 180 × 300 × 180cm, with an armed version wider on one side.

The specific trap is that a U commits three walls of a room at once, so there is exactly one way it can sit and no scope to adjust after delivery. Before ordering one, be certain about where the door is, where the television goes, and how somebody gets to the far seat without climbing over the near one. If the room has a single entrance in the middle of a wall, a U is usually the wrong shape.

Tape it out, properly

This settles every argument and takes five minutes. Masking tape or newspaper on the floor, the full L, both arms at their real length and the full depth on both.

Then use it. Walk the route you would normally walk. Open the door. Sit on the floor inside the shape and see whether the television is where you would want it. Leave the tape down for a day, because the thing you notice on day one is the size and the thing you notice on day two is the route you now cannot take.

Then check it gets in

Two different questions, and a sofa has to pass both. A corner arrives in pieces, and each piece is still the length of one arm — so the corner unit and the arms each have to make it through the door, down the hall and round the turn at the bottom of the stairs.

That is the size guide’s job, and it has a calculator that takes your doorway width and tells you directly. One thing worth knowing before you panic at a tight number: the feet unscrew, which takes around 10cm off the height, and that alone gets a great many sofas through a standard UK doorway they would not clear assembled.

And if a measurement is genuinely borderline, send us the numbers. It costs nothing, and we would far rather work through it now than on the doorstep.