Choosing the right size for your new decorative pillows.

How would you decide what size of a decorative pillow is right for your chair? Not too big, not too small, but just the one, which fits perfectly?

First decide what shape you want. Personally myself I would exclude the round one to be used in a chair. It would be suitable for a sofa, but not for a chair. It brings us to basic options of square, triangular or rectangular decorative pillow shape.

Let’s say, you decide to use a square pillow for your chair. How would you decide on a size? Right – you measure the chair first to find out how mush space you have for your decorative pillow. And you need to remember about harmony and proportions. If the chair is small and you want a big pillow for it – it would be out of scale. Same thing with the big chair: if you put a tiny pillow there, it will be lost and also look out of scale. Are you saying that you adore that little pillow and want to use it any way?

Well, you have few options: you can ignore that proportions are wrong and enjoy it anyway. Or you could add another bigger pillow and put this tiny one in front of a bigger pillow. You should remember that visual appearance of stuffed pillow will be smaller, than its measurements. Why? Because the measurements are given for flat pillow cover, but after being stuffed its outer lines get smaller. For example 16” x 16” pillow will take about 14” of a chair space. And you need to leave some space on both sides of a pillow, so it does not look squeezed into the chair.

How to choose between square and rectangular shape? Consider the height of a chair back. For taller chairs I would use square ones, for shorter chairs I would prefer the rectangular one.

But, hey, aren’t the rules made to be broken?

interior decor