We just broke ground on our first home! There is one main living space on the first floor and a 16x14 loft above the dining room that overlooks the living room. The living room is in the front of the house and is about 14x13. There is a very small foyer in the front of the house that enters into the living room, and the stairs leading to the second floor are also in the living room, lined up with the front door.

(Just a heads up...I am going to try to explain in as much detail as possible so please forgive the wall of text)

We have been going back and forth on how to lay out the furniture in the living room. The living room opens right into the dining room so there is really only one main wall that can have furniture, unless we put something in front of the stairs which I am not sure about. When we went over the plan, we decided to put the cable port on the outside wall of the house (on the wall across from the stairs). Am I right that it would look weird to put the TV in front of the stairs (they are open stairs with spindles, not a half-wall)? Here is a rough idea of the layout I was thinking, although I am not sure if everything is actually to scale because I drew the items onto the floor plan using Google Drawing lol. I will also add some pictures of a home of this style that has been built already, although none of the pictures really give a full picture of the living room.

(Next to the bench would be two accent chairs, one on each side. Also, there is a single window on the side wall sort of between the living room and the dining room to bring in some more natural light. The window is lined up with the hallway. Finally, the kitchen and dining room have vinyl floors, and the floor is lined up with the dimensions of the kitchen, so although it says the dining room is 15x13, it is actually 15x10 because the carpet extends back, and the living room is closer to 14x17. The dotted line just shows where the loft above starts. From the front of the house to the dotted line is a vaulted ceiling.)

Another layout I was thinking is to put the bigger couch against the staircase...that would probably be a better idea if we wanted to plug anything in to the side table, but I think it would look better if the walkway was behind the couches.

Another idea would be to put the TV under the stairs of course and the big couch against the back wall and the smaller couch and everything else in the same place. I just think that won't really look that great.

Other ideas?

View from the dining room.

View of living room and dining room from the front door (You can see on the left that they put the cable outlet in the same place as ours will be (except ours is lower because we are not mounting the TV)

View of living room from stairs.