How to Style a Living Room with a Modular Sofa

Your new Koala sectional sofa just arrived, you've assembled it in record time, thanks to our tool-free design, and now you're standing in your living room wondering what shape coffee table for sectional works best. Should you go with a round, square, or oval coffee table?                                                                                    

After years of helping customers transform their living spaces, we've learned that styling a room around a sectional is not just about picking a coffee table. It’s about discovering what shape coffee table works for your living room design.              

But we understand that with so many furniture pieces, adaptability can leave you paralyzed by choice, especially when you can not figure out the ideal coffee table size.               

This guide is packed with our top styling tips, real customer solutions, and a few insider secrets to help you strike the perfect balance between function and flair. 

Contents

• Understanding Your Modular Sofa's Potential

• Choosing the Perfect Coffee Table

• Mastering the Layout

• Transform Your Living Room With Flexible Modular Comfort

Understanding Your Modular Sofa's Potential 

Sectional sofas aren’t just oversized versions of your standard couch. They’re total game-changers, and they deserve their own styling rulebook. If you’ve been treating your modular setup like a regular old three-seater, you're seriously missing out. Here’s why they play by their own styling rules. 

Multiple Zones, Multiple Opportunities

Unlike your classic one-piece sofa that creates a single hangout spot, sectional sofas naturally carve out multiple zones in your family room. That means more function, more personality, and way more styling fun.

Here’s how each bit pulls its weight:

• The main seating area becomes your go-to entertainment hub

• Corner spots turn into cozy reading nooks

• Chaises double as dreamy reading retreats

• Hidden compartments rescue wasted space with sneaky storage solutions

This multi-zone magic means you can’t just place a lamp in the corner and be done with it. Every area needs its own lighting, side table, and decorative flair, while still playing nicely with the rest of the room.                   

The Floating Advantage

Sectionals give you the confidence to pull your furniture away from the walls, something most Americans are a bit hesitant to try. The substantial presence of a sofa actually makes floating arrangements feel intentional rather than accidental.     

Float your sectional, and boom, you’ve got 360-degree styling potential. The back of your sofa becomes prime real estate for console tables, artwork, or a jungle of indoor plants. You’re no longer just decorating the front. You're styling a full-blown furniture island.

Common Sectional Configurations

Bangalow Modular Chaise Sofa

The beauty of modular sofas lies in their ability to adapt to your space and lifestyle, not the other way around. Gone are the days of cramming a rigid three-piece suite into your family room and calling it done. Here are the most popular configurations that actually work in real American homes.           

L-Shape Sectional    

This is the crowd-pleaser for good reason. An L-shaped configuration gives you maximum seating without hogging the entire room. Perfect for corner positioning, it forms a natural conversation zone while leaving plenty of space for foot traffic. 

The Modular Sofa absolutely shines in this setup. You can create the perfect L-shape for your space in sofa, chaise, or corner configurations. The chaise option gives you that luxurious stretch-out zone while maintaining enough traditional seating for when friends come over. Position the chaise section facing your TV or towards the room's best view, and you've created a proper lounging destination.

The Snug Corner Setup

When space is tight, push that modular beauty right into the corner and maximize every square inch. Layer with throws, add a lamp, and you’ve created a quiet escape that feels intentional, not improvised.        

The Straight Line Statement

Sometimes the boldest move is the simplest one. A straight-line configuration along your longest wall creates clean, uninterrupted lines that make rooms appear larger than they actually are. This works well in narrow spaces where an L-shape would block natural flow.               

The table below summarizes what each configuration is great for:

Choosing the Perfect Coffee Table

Bangalow Sectional

Here's the million-dollar question we get asked constantly. What size coffee table works without making your living space feel like an obstacle course? The answer isn't as straightforward as a measuring tape might suggest, especially when your sectional sofa changes often. Before you put down just any coffee table, here’s what you need to figure out first. 

The Right Shape Coffee Table

Round coffee tables are the Switzerland of the furniture world. Neutral, diplomatic, and they play well with everyone. They're excellent for modular sofas because no matter how you arrange your furniture, a round table never has a "wrong" side.   

Plus, unlike a square coffee table, a round coffee table has no sharp corners, which means no bruised shins during those midnight snack runs. These coffee tables also encourage better flow in a tighter seating area, making the space feel more open and inviting.                                                

Rectangular coffee tables bring a bit more real estate to the party. They work really well with straight configurations and can look stunning with corner setups too.         

The Perfect Coffee Table Size and Distance

The ideal coffee table size should be relative to your sofa and living space. A recommended starting point is a coffee table that is two-thirds the length of your sofa. 

For the distance, the classic design rule says 14-18 inches between the sofa and the coffee table; close enough to comfortably reach your snacks without overstretching. With sectional sofas? Treat this as a gentle suggestion.                                                     

• Love putting your feet up? Go closer to 14 inches

• Do Kids race around your living room furniture like it’s a track? Push it out to 18+ inches    

• Height-wise: Your coffee table height should match your seat height or be slightly lower than your sofa cushions.

Your "longest side" might change weekly, depending on how you’re configuring your sofa. Go slightly smaller than you think. It’s easy to supplement a small coffee table, unlike a large one, which becomes a permanent obstacle. 

Coffee Tables for L-shaped Configurations

L-shaped configurations call for a bit of clever thinking. You’ve got these two solid options up your sleeve:

• Option 1: One larger rectangular coffee table that serves both sides

• Option 2: Two smaller coffee tables that move independently              

And don’t forget about traffic flow. Sometimes, a smaller coffee table with a side table combo beats one large centerpiece, especially if you're dealing with tight corners and busy feet.  

Mastering the Layout

Your Koala sectional sofa doesn't just sit in your family room. It shapes it. Unlike traditional furniture arrangements where everything orbits around a fixed sofa, our sectional pieces let you play director, creating different scenes for different moments in your life.    

Conversation Zones vs TV-watching Setups

Here's what most people get wrong: they try to make their living room do everything at once. With a sectional sofa, you can actually have your cake and eat it too. Just not at the same time.

For conversation-friendly setups, break your sectional into smaller groupings that face each other, creating intimate pockets where people naturally lean in to chat. Add a couple of accent chairs at angles, and suddenly you've got a space that says "tell me more" instead of "pass the remote."

Now, when it's time to switch into TV-watching mode, that's when you bring out the classic U or L-shape, with all seats getting prime viewing angles. The trick is keeping your configuration tight enough that nobody needs binoculars, but open enough that people can comfortably reach their snack without climbing over each other.               

Watch out for these flow-killers:

• Rectangular or square coffee tables that force detours

• Corners that create dead ends

• Configurations that block doorways or windows           

Balancing Your Sectional Sofa with Other Furniture

Your sectional sofa is likely the biggest piece in your room, but that doesn't mean it should bully everything else into the corners. The secret is visual weight distribution.                       

If your sectional takes up one side of the room, balance it with substantial pieces on the opposite walls with a bookshelf, console, or gallery. Think of it like a seesaw. That chunky L-shape is pulling some serious weight, so you’ll need equally solid pieces on the opposite side to keep things feeling even and well-grounded.        

Transform Your Living Room With Flexible Modular Comfort          

There you have it. Everything you need to turn your living room from a furniture puzzle into a space that works as hard as you do. 

The beauty of bringing home a Koala sectional isn't just that it comes with tool-free assembly. It's that our direct-to-consumer approach means you're getting furniture that's actually designed for how real Americans live in large or small spaces, not how some corporate boardroom thinks you should live.

Our award-winning modular system gives you all the flexibility without the guesswork. And if you absolutely hate how everything looks after a few weeks? That 120-day trial isn't just generous. It's us backing our designs with zero nonsense.    

This is furniture that adapts to your life, not the other way around. FSC-certified wood that gets better with age. Kloudcell® cushioning that bounces back no matter how many movie marathons you throw at it. B Corp certified sustainability, which means your living room upgrade doesn't cost the earth.             

Ready to transform your living room? Browse our sofa range and get free same-day delivery. Your perfect setup is just a few clicks away.