How a Sofa Table Can Help You Stage a Room

Ever since I heard of something called a sofa table, I was intrigued. A sofa table is not the same animal as an end table or a coffee table. It's taller and longer.  

The handy thing to know about a sofa table is that it can do all kinds of things to make your home staging more effective.

The sofa table is designed to sit behind the sofa. It is often as long as a sofa or couch, but can be half that length. It needs to be longer than it is wide.

And it needs to be about as tall as the sofa it sits behind.

Since it can fill the space between the sofa and the wall, or between the sofa and the next room, plenty of furniture pieces can stand in for a sofa table -- consoles, demi lunes, low hutches, farm tables, or even glass topped tables constructed from pedestals.

Here are some of the ways a sofa table can help you when you are staging your home.

A table like this can add interesting style to an ordinary room. Betterimprovement.com

A snazzy mirrored table introduces us to the room we're about to enter. d30ppm.

This dark unit divides the room to make it more cozy. Decorpad.

This sleek and leggy table adds some formal sophistication. Cymaxstores.

When you just need to fill some space, a chunky sofa table does the trick. Cymaxstores.

A sofa table gives you the opportunity to emphasize a certain style, like modern. Cymax.

What I like about this table is its practicality. It's a workhorse for storage. Thomasville.

Here is another storage unit doing duty as a sofa table. Thomasville.

  

Although we can't see the sofa table here, it's there providing a place for the lamp. Electricrevisited.

When you have a focal point, like a view, that needs framing, a sofa table helps by giving you a base for adding matching lamps, like these pale teal ones. Cloudfront.net.

This wood table is the perfect height for the sofa. It brings balance to the space. Cloudfront.

A budget room can get a huge quality boost from a table like this one. Cymaxstores.

Is there a place in your staged home for a sofa table? Chances are, if you have a sofa, it could get some staging help from its own table.

Experiment with what you have. Perhaps you can convert a desk or entertainment center to a sofa table. Or you could assemble one from matched pedestals and a glass top. I once made one from plastic milk crates and a plywood top, all covered with the perfectly sized tablecloth. If a sofa backs up to a wall in a small space, it's easy to fake a table behind it by mounting a shelf on the wall at about the height of the sofa back.  

Once you put a sofa table in service for staging your home, you'll wonder how you got along without one!