The Building Blocks of Interior Design: Line
Updated: 6 days ago
When Your Eye Knows Where to Look
This post may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend what I truly use and love.
In The Building Blocks of Interior Design, I described the seven elements of interior design. Designers use these elements to create rooms that are comfortable, balanced, functional, and beautiful.
No one is born knowing how to hang drywall—and no one is born knowing the elements of interior design and how to apply them.
Like any skill, the elements of interior design can be learned and used to create a home that’s functional and beautiful.
Including your home.
In this post we’ll cover the element of line and how to use it in your home.
What is Line in Interior Design?
Line is the visual path that guides your eye through space. It gives a room structure, tells you where to look, and can even change how you perceive the room's proportions.
Pretty powerful stuff.
Let’s dig in.
Line Defines Shape and Guides the Eye
Line in interior design is not a literal line. It’s the things in a room that our eyes perceive as lines, like architectural features (windows, doors, and beams), the frames that surround our wall art, the edges we see around furniture and décor, and the relationships our brains create between objects.
Let’s make this a little less abstract.
A sofa doesn’t have a black outline around it (unless you’re talking about a cartoon sofa). But—your eye sees where the sofa ends and the floor begins.
And, in our brains, that edge becomes a line.
We see lines in:
The top edge of a countertop
The sides of a doorway
The meeting of wall and ceiling
The edge of a rug against the floor
The outline of a mirror
The arms and back of a chair
The folds of drapery
The edges of cabinetry
The boundary between two colors or materials
Our brains also create line by establishing relationships between objects through alignment, repetition, proximity, and pattern:
Hang three pictures at exactly the same height, and your eye will group them.
Put three pendant lights over a kitchen island and your eye will see a horizontal path through them.
Place a 3-light floor lamp in your living room, and your eye will connect those lights into a vertical axis.
We decorate our homes with objects, and our eyes find the line in those objects.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an expert at using line to guide the eye. At Fallingwater, designed as a weekend retreat for the Kaufmann family, Wright used line throughout the home to draw attention to the woods and water surrounding the home. Here’s just one example:
Line Provides Structure and Predictability
Our brains are always trying to make sense of the world. We are hard-wired to look for patterns. We prefer order, predictability, and structure. Too much stuff on display makes our brains work harder than necessary, creating stress.
Line creates recognizable patterns that allow our brains to make sense of our surroundings so we know where to look first (and second, and third) to easily navigate through a room.
Line establishes predictability and order in a room so our brains don’t have to work as hard to sort out visual stimuli.
Line Sets a Mood
When I moved from Florida to Arizona, I moved from a large apartment with big rooms to a smaller apartment with proportionately smaller rooms. My beloved 96-inch sofa, massive side tables, and hefty table lamps were hilariously too large for my new space.
I bought smaller-scale living room furniture. Visitors to my new space remarked on how mellow and soothing my home was. One Saturday morning, a few months after moving in, I looked around my living room and realized that I had incorporated curved lines throughout the room.
The drapes were a jacquard with a recurring circle motif.
The table lamps were composed of metal circles welded together.
The coffee table was round.
The throw pillows were circular.
The wall mirror was round.
Those repeated curved lines softened the room’s overall look and gently carried the eye around the room.
I hadn’t consciously planned any of it, but it all worked.
When I saw all those repeated circular lines, I confess I was a bit gobsmacked.
My move to Arizona was out of my comfort zone, to a place where I knew no one. Was I unconsciously selecting décor for my living room that felt softer and more welcoming? Looking back, I’m pretty sure that’s what I was doing.
Types of Line in Interior Design
Why did circular lines work for me in my Arizona apartment? To answer that, let’s first look at what your eyes do when they see—and follow—a particular type of line.
Horizontal lines carry the eye across a room.
Vertical lines carry the eye up and down.
Diagonal lines carry the eye across, up, and down simultaneously.
Curved lines change direction continuously and carry the eye with them—to a different location or back to where it started.
How our eyes move through a space affects how we experience it.
Let’s break this down a bit more.
Horizontal Line
Horizontal lines create calmness and stability and visually widen narrow spaces. Frank Lloyd Wright leveraged this phenomenon by making frequent use of horizontal line at Fallingwater as you can see in Fallingwater’s restful and serene living room.
Vertical Line
Vertical lines convey strength and formality and create a sense of height. Gothic church architecture emphasized vertical lines to reflect human aspirations and God’s power (although the competition to build ever-taller cathedrals has also been dubbed ‘spire envy’).
Diagonal Line
Because diagonal lines force the eye to move so dynamically, they bring energy and action into a space. A great architectural example is the Eiffel Tower, with its strong diagonal structural lattice.
Curved Line
Like in my Arizona apartment, curved lines bring softness, fluidity, and warmth into a space. The TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, designed by Eero Saarinen, is so curvy that it could relax even the most committed aerophobe. I mean, look at it:
At this point you’re probably thinking, “OK, Nannette. I get it. So what?”
Here’s what.
You can use line to make your home look better and help you, your family, and your guests feel better while they’re in your home.
Interested?
I thought so.
Using Line to Make Your Home Look and Feel Better
Our brains look for relationships. When the lines in a room create relationships that appear accidental or unresolved, something can feel “off” even when we can't immediately identify why. In the one place where everything should feel “on.”
Here’s how to evaluate your spaces and use line to make your home an easier and more beautiful place to live.
Start by entering your room or space and ask yourself the following questions:
Where do I want my eyes to go first?
Is that where they go?
If not, where do my eyes go first?
What line or lines is sending me there?
What can I change in this room so my eyes are led to where I want them to go?
Are there lines in this room that emphasize something I’d rather minimize?
Are there competing lines that make the room feel chaotic or harsh?
Could I use line to visually adjust this room’s proportions?
Write down your answers and take pictures in the room (I’ve found that looking at pictures rather than the physical room makes it easier to actually see the lines created by the room’s objects and architectural elements).
Much of the time line adjustment comes down to moving furniture and décor to where their lines will send your eyes where you want them to go.
Here are a few examples to help you get started.
Adjusting a Focal Point—Living Room
In this example, the furniture is arranged to reinforce the fireplace as the room’s focal point—but the fireplace competes with the large colorful painting that’s hung in the alcove adjacent to the fireplace.
The painting is fighting the visual structure established by everything else in the room. You’re just not quite sure where to look first.
By simply moving the painting above the fireplace, all the visual cues line up.
Adjusting a Focal Point—Bedroom
In this example, the bed, with its substantial headboard and clean-line side tables, should be the focal point in this bedroom. But, when placed in front of the large window, the bed says “Look at Me!”—but the window, with its strong vertical and horizontal lines, says “Noooo! Look at ME!”
Please don’t make people choose. In this bedroom, the large, beautifully-appointed bed clearly needs to be the focal point.
To remove the conflicting focal points, move the bed to the long wall and draw the drapes so the window’s lines no longer compete with the lines created by the headboard, bedframe, and side tables.
Interrupting Lines to Create Softness
This is an example from my home. I placed my green leather reading chair in the corner of the living room against the concrete block wall that I painted the same green as the chair. I loved my chair. I loved the wall color. Both had worked in my condo. Now the chair/wall combination looked harsh and unfriendly.
I realized that the straight lines of the chair were reinforcing the grid of the concrete-block wall. I didn't replace the chair or move it. Instead, I threw a chunky throw over the back, interrupting some of those straight lines and introducing irregular curved lines to provide visual softness and overall balance.
Now I love it.
Repetition and Interruption
In this example, the homeowner has hung three landscapes in a row, all at the same height. Because of the Rule of Three, your brain would see the lines created by the three frames and automatically group the paintings together—except that the lighter center frame interrupts the line and the visual repetition.
By changing the central frame to black, these three paintings read more readily as one visual unit. The implied horizontal line becomes stronger because size, alignment and frame treatment are all reinforcing the relationship.
BUT. The first set of paintings isn’t necessarily wrong. Interrupting a line or pattern attracts attention. Maybe that’s what the homeowner intended. Maybe the central landscape depicts an important place in the homeowner’s life, and she wanted to emphasize it. If so, the difference in frame color makes perfect sense.
When I furnished that apartment in Arizona, I had no idea I was surrounding myself with curved lines. I just knew that the room helped me feel better during a challenging time in my life.
You don't need to drive yourself crazy analyzing every horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and curved line in your home.
But, when a space doesn't look or feel quite right, line gives you another way to figure out why—and another tool for making your space feel right.
Like Little Green Home?
Subscribe to get new posts that help you build a home you love—that loves you back.
Up Next
The Building Blocks of Interior Design: Light
Comments