At Spade and Archer Design Agency our goal is to try to make every room look as big as possible while still having a human scale.
While we will often place a sofa near a wall, we will nearly never press it up against the wall, unless the room is so tight that we have to. We try to leave at least a 6” gap between the wall and the back of the sofa to make the space look a bit more relaxed. The last thing we want to see “perimeter staging.” It’s that thing in spaces where it feels like all the furniture was placed in the middle of the room, the room was spun really fast and all the furniture flew to the outer walls and stayed there. Furniture does not need to be anchored by a wall, let it breath, let it live, let it float.