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RugFrameTerrace

Measurement 4 of 4

Measure the Seating

Two heights taken with somebody actually sitting down: the seat, and the eye. Everything about lamp height follows from the second one.

What you need in your hand

  • A steel tape and a straight edge, such as a book, to bridge from the eye to the tape.
  • A willing person to sit still for ninety seconds. Measuring your own eye height is possible and inaccurate.
  • A pencil, and a wall you do not mind marking lightly.

3 items.

The steps

5 of them, in order.

  1. Measure the seat height, compressed

    Sit on the sofa, then have someone measure from the floor to the top of the cushion beside you while you are still on it. An uncompressed cushion reads 2 to 4 in higher than the height you actually sit at, and that error goes straight into every number after it.

  2. Measure the eye height above the seat

    With the same person seated normally — not sitting up straight for the measurement — hold a straight edge level from the outer corner of the eye to the wall and mark it. Measure the mark to the floor. That is seated eye height, and it is commonly somewhere between 41 and 49 in.

  1. Repeat for the second person

    If two people use the room, take both. Where they differ by more than three inches, the lower one governs, because glare is worse than a lamp that is slightly low.

  2. Measure the space beside the arm

    Measure the floor space to the side of and slightly behind the seat where a lamp base could stand. Note both the width available and the distance from that spot to the nearest outlet, following the route the cord will actually take around the rug.

  1. Convert eye height to lamp height

    The bottom of the shade wants to sit at or just below your seated eye mark. On a shaded floor lamp the shade bottom is roughly 10 to 14 in below the overall height, so add that to your eye height figure to get the lamp height to look for.

Where it goes wrong

3 mistakes that account for most of the returns.

Measuring seat height with nobody on the sofa.
Every number downstream is 2 to 4 in too high, which is enough to put a bulb in your eye line.
Measuring eye height sitting up straight.
Nobody reads sitting up straight. Measure the posture the room is used in.
Measuring the cord distance in a straight line.
The straight line crosses the rug. The route that does not cross the rug is longer, sometimes by several feet, and it is the one the cord has to reach.

Sources for this page

3 sources, checked by opening each one.