Two years later... We ended up purchasing a 3-seater for wall opposite fireplace, a 2-seater for under the highlight window (leaves a comfortable space to enter the room) and an armchair placed diagonally opposite the couches. I've fooled the advice to pull the furniture in off the walls a little. We have just updated the fireplace with the (professional) installation of an insert wood heater and (DIY) replacement of hearth and tiles/timber mantel to conceal the brick while meeting the safety specifications of the heater (required a much wider/deeper hearth than the existing brick one so we removed and replaced with a slab of honed granite, and the minimum height for breastplate/mantel shelf posed a few design limitations). TV mounted above fireplace to allow for better furniture placement. Not quite the picture I had settled on 2 years ago, but works with the style of updates we have made elsewhere. Thank you for all the advice. before: After:

Also love the buffet....it could be the "hero" of the room. It is beautiful and they are so hard to come by at a reasonable price. I have a much cheaper style mid century buffet and initially had the TV on top of it, but now the TV is wall mounted above it. The distance between the wall and the couch wall is about 4m and we have no issues with the TV being too high...you definitely need to factor that in if you wall mount it though...luckily I had a handyman friend helping me, otherwise I would have put the TV too high. With the TV being mounted, it actually makes the buffet more of a feature and anything that is put on the buffet is now "displayed" instead of being part of clutter with the TV. It looks great and I know yours will too if you wall mount the TV. That is the great thing about the mid century buffets...they seem to fit in just as well as modern furniture as they do with the classic furniture....and because your is "classic", it will never date...a great investment.

We built our house in 1975 and had a similar problem; A teeny tiny family room with too many doors. After several years of squeezing ourselves into this poorly functioning excuse of a "family" room, which has entrances in every corner bar one, plus an entry into the kitchen and sliding door to outside, in a fit of frustration, I decided that our under-utilised formal lounge/dining would be used as a living room with the TV, although we chose to keep the dining table in that room as it is a long narrow room. I made this change 26 years ago. The family room is now just a sitting area with one 2.5 seater couch and a side table at each end, no TV and is a great space for a few people to congregate in to keep the cook company or just to read. However it would have worked equally well with the dining table there. In any case, because of all the doorways, it is really just a walk-through area, but now feels spacious and "settled" instead of crowded and messy. I can recommend the change.....you will feel much less at "sixes and sevens" with your home.

I agree with bringing the sofa forward, closer to start of the patio window. If you are going to have more than one sofa, maybe have the other placed in front of the entrance way, but facing patio window, and as Dr Retro mentioned a sofa table/unit behind the sofa, making it a feature point from the main entrance. The sofas would be placed in an L shape giving you a warmer cozier feel to the TV area. A narrow hall way table/unit on the wall were the sofa is currently sitting in the photo you supplied Even a mirror on the wall above table for a formal touch, as it will also be seen from the main entrance. We have a main entrance that opens up onto our two main living areas, so it took a bit of experimenting and rearranging our furniture till we settled on a practical layout, but at the sometime still having that entrance way feel to the home. I hope this has been helpful.