Furnishing a narrow living room without making it feel like a corridor

A narrow room fights you in one specific way: the obvious layout — sofa against the long wall, everything else facing it — makes the room read as a passage. Break the length instead. A pair of chairs at right angles to the sofa, or a console behind it, gives the eye somewhere to stop. A rug that runs across the short axis rather than along the long one does the same thing for the floor. Go tall rather than wide with storage. A narrow bookcase at 84 inches holds as much as a low unit twice its width and gives back the floor you actually need to walk on. Leave 30 to 36 inches for the walking route and be strict about it. Everything else can be squeezed; that cannot.