Sometimes the problem isn’t that you don’t have enough space. It’s that you can see all of it.
Stand at the entrance of an oversized ballroom or exhibit hall and look across the room. If your eye travels all the way to the opposite wall, up to the ceiling, and across long stretches of open floor, the architecture is setting the scale.
That can make even a well-designed event look sparse. A substantial sofa suddenly looks small. Lounge groupings appear to float in the middle of the floor. Twenty feet of empty space between them becomes more noticeable than the furniture itself.
Adding more furniture won’t correct the proportions if the eye can still travel across the entire room.
Shortening a sightline makes the farthest reaches less apparent. Larger furniture configurations hold their own against the architecture. Defined edges give a lounge a sense of containment. Adding height near the furniture keeps a soaring ceiling from dominating everything below.
From inside a lounge or gathering area, guests shouldn’t be visually taking in the entire ballroom at once.
Stand where guests will first see the room. How far can you see?
A clear view all the way to the opposite wall immediately reveals the scale of a ballroom. In an exhibit hall, the same thing happens when the eye travels across a long stretch of open floor without encountering anything substantial enough to stop it.
Drape gives planners considerable control over that view.
CORT Events’ Poly Premier Drape can establish a new visual boundary farther into the room. Place it behind a stage, lounge, bar, or gathering area and the eye stops there rather than continuing another 40 or 50 feet into unused space.
A 30-foot run of Poly Premier Drape behind a lounge may have more impact on that lounge than draping a distant ballroom wall.
Smaller elements can interrupt the remaining views. The Miramar Divider can be positioned vertically when more height is needed or horizontally to create a wider boundary. Boxwood Hedges and Havana Palm Dividers add height and density without introducing a solid partition.
Push those pieces to the perimeter and the room still reads at its full scale. Bring them closer to the furniture and they interrupt the view from within the lounge itself.
A section of drape behind the seating, greenery along one edge, and a divider positioned off another side may be enough to keep the opposite end of the ballroom out of view.
A sofa, two chairs, and a coffee table can create a perfectly proportioned lounge in a smaller venue. Put the same grouping in the middle of a convention hall and it may barely register.
Spreading several small groupings across the floor often creates more islands surrounded by open space.
Large rooms need stronger forms.
CORT Events’ Endless Collection gives planners the flexibility to build larger configurations using curves, S-shapes, circles, and other modular arrangements. An Endless Low Back Comma Sectional reads as one long curved form. An Endless S-Curve carries that shape across a larger footprint. A closed-circle configuration creates a substantial center within an otherwise open room.
Inside a rectangular ballroom full of straight walls and long sightlines, a large curved sectional gives the eye a different shape to register.
A substantial bar or counter can provide similar visual weight. In a large room, one long bar has a stronger presence than a scattering of small cocktail tables.
Step back and look at the grouping from across the room. If the architecture overwhelms it, adding another accent chair probably isn’t the answer.
In a large venue, the floor may be one of the biggest visual surfaces in the room.
Long stretches of exposed ballroom carpet or exhibit-hall flooring make the distance between furniture groupings more apparent. A rug interrupts that expanse and establishes a footprint beneath the furniture.
CORT Events’ rug collection includes options such as the Del Mar Tonal Rug, Impact Shag Rug, Karma Rug, and Cheyenne Rug, giving planners different textures and patterns to work into the design.
Size matters as much as the pattern or color.
A small rug under a large sectional can exaggerate the scale problem. If most of the furniture extends beyond its edges, the rug looks undersized and the exposed floor around it becomes even more noticeable.
A curved Endless configuration sitting within a generous rug footprint reads as one larger composition instead of several pieces arranged around a small rectangle.
Treat the rug as the floor of the smaller space you’re creating inside the ballroom.
Once the room is installed, go back to the entrance and look at the whole space before inspecting individual details.
Can you still see uninterrupted from one end of the venue to the other? Do the furniture groupings have enough presence from this distance? Where are the largest expanses of exposed floor? Can you see where one lounge or seating area ends and the next begins? Is the ceiling still pulling attention away from everything below it?
Then walk into the room and sit in one of the lounges.
Look at what you can see from that seat. If the opposite ballroom wall, neighboring furniture groupings, and most of the open floor are still in view, try moving a divider, bringing greenery forward, extending the drape, or increasing the rug footprint.
A few feet can change the composition considerably.
CORT Events teams can help planners make these calls before installation: where Poly Premier Drape should bring the perceived perimeter inward, how much visual weight a furniture configuration needs for the venue, and where rugs, greenery, and dividers will have the greatest impact on scale.
Explore CORT Events furniture, drape, and décor for your next event space.