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Will the sofa fit through the door and round the corner?

The sofa will fit through the door if its smallest dimension is less than the door's clear opening — but it can only turn a corner once the hallway is clearly wider than the sofa's depth.

The four measurements to take — in this order

A sofa rarely gets stuck in the doorway itself. It gets stuck in the corner right after it. So there are four things to measure before you order, and they need to be measured in this order, because it's the last two that most often sink the deal:

1. The door's clear opening — width and height between the inner faces of the frame.
2. The hallway's clear width — wall to wall, measured where it's narrowest.
3. The turning space at the corner — the width of both hallways that meet at the corner.
4. The clear height over the stairs — measured vertically up from the front edge of the tread to whatever is above it.

And on the sofa, you need three numbers: length, depth and height — plus how many centimetres you can shave off by unscrewing the legs and removing loose seat and back cushions.

1. The door's clear opening — not the frame, not the rough opening

The clear opening is the gap that's actually left once the door is open. Hold the tape measure horizontally between the two inner faces of the frame at around a metre's height — not in the rough opening behind the frame, and not out to the outer edge of the frame. If there's a doorstop or architrave on the frame, measure inside it. And if the door leaf can't be lifted off its hinges, the leaf itself sits in the opening: subtract the leaf's thickness (typically 4 cm) again.

Interior doors are sold in fixed standard widths, but the leaf's catalogue size is not the opening you can carry a sofa through: the frame rebate and doorstop take off a few centimetres, and a leaf that can't be lifted off takes a further four centimetres or so. A door sold as an "80" easily gives only 74-76 cm of clear opening in practice — and around 70 with the leaf still hanging. So never work from the catalogue figure. Measure the opening.

The height is measured from the finished floor to the head of the frame. If there's new flooring, carpet or a threshold strip, it counts — it's the clear height that's actually left now that decides the matter.

The sum: will the sofa fit through the door?

A sofa is a box with three dimensions. When you carry it through a door, two of the three dimensions face the opening — you choose which two by turning the sofa. The rule is therefore short:

The sofa will go through if its smallest dimension is less than the door's clear width, and its second-smallest dimension is less than the door's clear height. Tilting the sofa at an angle barely helps: a box can only pass through a narrow opening if its narrowest side is narrower than the opening.

Example 1 — it doesn't fit. Sofa: 220 cm long, 95 cm deep, 85 cm high. Door: 69 cm clear width, 204 cm clear height. The sofa's smallest dimension is 85 cm (the height) — and 85 cm > 69 cm. There's no way through. The sofa has to be taken apart, brought in through a window, or returned.

Example 2 — it fits, with 2 cm to spare. A wider door with 74 cm clear opening. Sofa: 210 cm long, 88 cm deep, 82 cm high. The legs come off: the height drops to 72 cm. The sofa is now carried on its side, so the opening needs to accommodate 88 × 72 cm. 72 cm < 74 cm ✔, and 88 cm < 204 cm ✔. It goes through — but only because the legs came off.

Remove everything loose before you measure the sofa: back cushions, seat cushions, legs and any loose armrests. On many sofas that's 10-15 cm off the depth and 8-12 cm off the height, and it's often exactly that margin that decides the outcome.

2 and 3. The corner — this is where the sofa gets stuck

A corner is harder than a door, and most people are surprised by how much harder. When a rigid box has to turn 90° between two hallways, both hallways' widths have to accommodate not just the sofa's depth, but the extra space its corners swing out into along the way.

For a hallway of width a, a hallway of width b and a sofa of depth w, the longest sofa that can turn the corner flat (that is, without being tilted) is:

L = the smallest value the expression a/sin v + b/cos v − w · (1/tan v + tan v) can take, as the angle v runs from 0° to 90°.

You don't need to work through the formula yourself — here it is worked out for the hallway widths houses actually have. Every figure is the longest sofa, in cm, that can turn the corner:

• Hallway 90 × 90 cm, sofa depth 90 cm: 75 cm. In other words: impossible. The sofa is deeper than it's allowed to be long.
• Hallway 90 × 90 cm, sofa depth 80 cm: 95 cm. Only an armchair gets round.
• Hallway 100 × 100 cm, sofa depth 90 cm: 103 cm.
• Hallway 100 × 100 cm, sofa depth 80 cm: 123 cm.
• Hallway 110 × 110 cm, sofa depth 90 cm: 131 cm.
• Hallway 120 × 120 cm, sofa depth 90 cm: 159 cm.
• Hallway 120 × 120 cm, sofa depth 80 cm: 179 cm.
• Hallway 150 × 100 cm, sofa depth 90 cm: 165 cm.

Notice how dramatically the figures react. Ten extra centimetres of hallway — from 100 to 110 cm — moves the limit from 103 to 131 cm. And ten centimetres less sofa depth in a 120 cm hallway moves the limit from 159 to 179 cm. That's why a narrow sofa is a completely different proposition from a deep one, in an old flat.

The most important conclusion: if the sofa is exactly as deep as the hallway is wide, it can never turn the corner flat — no matter how short it is. A sofa 90 cm deep in a 90 cm hallway is stuck solid the moment it needs to turn.

The three tricks that can save the corner

The limits on how long a sofa can be to turn a corner apply to a sofa held flat, at floor height. In reality you have three ways round it, and they're used in this order:

• Tilt the sofa on end. Stand it up on one armrest, and its footprint on the floor is no longer length × depth but depth × height — say 90 × 82 cm instead of 220 × 90 cm. The corner suddenly becomes easy. The cost is that the sofa's length is now vertical: you need enough ceiling height for the full length of the sofa, plus 10-15 cm to manoeuvre it.
• Borrow space from a door in the corner. If there's an open door or a recess right at the corner, the end of the sofa can poke into it while it turns. That works like a wider hallway — measure the recess's depth and add it to b in the sum.
• Take off the skirting board and the door leaf. A removed door leaf often frees up 4-5 cm, and a corner without skirting frees up 1-2 cm on each side. In a 90 cm hallway those centimetres aren't a nicety — they're the difference between yes and no.

4. The stairs: measure vertically up from the front edge of the tread

If the sofa has to go up or down a staircase, it isn't the width of the stairs that stops it — it's the clear height above the treads. Measure vertically up from the front edge of a tread to whatever is above it: the ceiling, the underside of the floor structure, a beam, a light fitting, or the underside of the flight above. Do this at the lowest point, typically where the stairs pass through the floor structure.

If the ceiling over the stairs is sloped and follows the flight, the space the sofa actually has, measured perpendicular to the stair run, is less than the vertical figure. At a typical stair pitch of around 38°, 210 cm of vertical clear height works out to roughly 165 cm perpendicular to the stairs — still plenty for a sofa 90 cm deep, but not enough to tilt a 220 cm sofa on end. If the sofa has to go up the stairs standing on end, you need the full length as clear height, and very few stairwells have that.

If the stairs have a landing (a level section with a turn), the landing is the real corner — measure it as two hallways meeting each other, and look up the limit in the table above of how long a sofa can be to turn a corner. A 90 × 90 cm landing is the classic reason a sofa ends up on the balcony instead.

How to get the measurements without crawling round with a tape measure

All four measurements — the door's clear opening, the hallway's width, the corner's two widths and the stairs' clear height — are internal measurements. That's exactly the kind of measurement a scaled floor plan of the home contains, and that the area figure in the official building register doesn't: official floor areas are measured to the outside of the exterior walls and say nothing about how wide the hallway is inside the home.

If you scan the home with the iPhone's LiDAR in HouseSense, you get a scaled plan with the internal measurements, and door and window openings come along as openings with a width and height — so the hallway width and the door opening can be read straight off the drawing instead of measured on site. But whichever method you use, two caveats matter when the margin is only a few centimetres: a plan shows the opening's dimensions, not necessarily the clear opening once the doorstop and door leaf are accounted for, and a sofa at 88 cm in a 90 cm corner is, in practice, decided by exactly that kind of detail. If there's less than 5 cm of margin in the sum, get the tape measure out and check on site.

The checklist to take to the furniture shop

• The sofa's three dimensions — and the dimensions with the legs and loose cushions off. Ask the shop whether the back can be removed.
• The door's clear opening in width and height, with and without the door leaf.
• The hallway's narrowest width along the whole route from the front door to the living room.
• Both widths at every corner along the route.
• Clear height over the stairs, measured vertically from the front edge of the tread — and the landing's two dimensions.
• The ceiling height in the hallway, if you're counting on tilting the sofa on end.

Take the measurements before you order. A sofa that won't fit through the door is rarely a fault with the sofa — it's a measuring mistake, and the cost of that usually lands on the buyer. Ask the supplier what happens if the piece can't be carried in, before you order.