Decide what the room is for, and be honest

A living room that is a reading room with occasional guests gets planned differently from a living room that is primarily a television room with a good chair in the corner. Both are legitimate. What does not work is refusing to decide, because the seating plan, the lighting and the traffic route all depend on the answer.

Write down what the room is for in one sentence with no conjunctions in it. If you cannot do that without an "and", the room has two jobs and one of them belongs somewhere else in the house.

The second question is how many people use it at once, honestly rather than aspirationally. Rooms are routinely furnished for the Christmas gathering rather than for the two people who sit in them every evening. That produces a room that is slightly wrong for fifty-one weeks of the year.

The third is what happens in it after dark, because that determines lighting and lighting determines whether the room is used at all. A room with one overhead fitting will be avoided in the evening no matter how good the furniture is.

Only once those three are settled is there any point looking at anything. The order matters more than the taste, and nearly every expensive mistake comes from buying in the wrong sequence.