Styling guide

Sizing a cushion to the seat

The rule of thumb that works: a cushion should be roughly two thirds the height of the sofa back it leans on. On a standard sofa that lands on the eighteen-to-twenty-inch square, which is why so much of the world's cushion production is that size and why the largest part of this range is too.

Go bigger on a deep-seated or low sofa, where a small cushion disappears into the crease and does nothing. Go smaller — or long and narrow — on an armchair, where a full-size square pushes you forward off the seat and gets moved to the floor within a week.

• Standard three-seat sofa: two eighteen-inch squares at the ends, one long lumbar in the middle.
• Deep or low sofa: twenty inches and up, or the arrangement reads as scatter rather than as furnishing.
• Armchair: one lumbar shape, not a square. It has to support a back without filling the seat.
• Bed: pairs across the width behind the sleeping pillows, with the largest at the back.

The insert rule

Buy the insert one to two inches larger than the cover. An eighteen-inch cover wants a twenty-inch insert. This looks wrong written down and is the single thing that separates a cushion that stands up on a sofa from one that sags in the middle with two empty ears at the corners.

The reason is that a cover is sewn to its finished dimension and an insert compresses. Matching the numbers exactly gives you a cover that is technically full and visually flat. Overfilling by an inch or two is what magazine photographs are doing, and it costs nothing to copy.

Pairs, threes and where the eye lands

Symmetry for a sofa, odd numbers for a bed. Two matching cushions at each end of a sofa reads as intentional; three across a bed in descending size reads as made. The mistake in both cases is the same one — an even scatter of five different cushions with nothing repeated, which reads as a pile rather than as a scheme.

Repeat one thing and vary the rest. If two cushions share a fabric, they can differ in size and color and still look related. If nothing is shared, nothing holds the group together. Forty-six pieces here come as a pair for exactly this reason.

Frames: hang, stand, or both

A frame on a wall wants its center at eye level, which is about fifty-seven inches from the floor and is lower than most people hang. A frame above a sofa or a console wants a gap of six to eight inches above the furniture, not centered on the wall as a whole — the eye reads the picture against the furniture, not against the ceiling.

Twenty frames in this range stand on an easel, hang on a wall or lie on a shelf, which means the decision does not have to be made in advance. For a gallery wall, lay the whole arrangement out on the floor first and keep the gaps equal; unequal gaps are the thing that looks wrong from the doorway even when you cannot say why.

Baskets: measure the shelf, not the basket

Take the internal height of the shelf opening and subtract an inch, take the depth and subtract two. The inch is so a basket can be lifted out rather than dragged, the two inches are for the basket's own front face and for whatever is fitted at the back of the unit.

Two baskets side by side on one shelf need a finger's width between them or they wedge. Where a set of matching baskets is going to fill a run of shelves, order the set together for the same reason a pair of cushions goes together: woven fiber varies in tone between production runs, and it is visible when they sit in a row.