You know your room. You know roughly what is going in it. The question nobody else answers is what have I got left — and will the next thing still fit? Put in your stands, tables, dance floor and bar, and see the floor space counting down, using real furniture footprints and the clearance each one actually needs. Free, no sign-up.
Add length and width and the calculator stops guessing: it lays everything out to scale and measures the biggest clear space actually left — area alone cannot tell you whether a car fits. The reserve holds back gangways, fire exit routes and door swings before anything is placed: 10–15% suits a dinner, 20%+ a busy exhibition or anything with a licence condition on aisle widths.
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| Item | Furniture | With access |
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A packed rectangle is a good sanity check, but a real room has pillars, doors that swing, a bar that has to be near the cellar and a fire route that has to stay clear. Metis lays your actual room out to scale, generates the seating, and shows it in 2D and 3D — so "will it fit" stops being an argument.
Start your free trialMost space calculators divide the room by a number per guest. That is fine for a rough guest count and useless for the question here, because a room does not fill up with people — it fills up with objects that need space around them.
So every item on this page carries two numbers:
Because neighbours share the gap between them, the space one item really occupies is (width + gap) × (depth + gap) — a pitch, not a footprint. That is why a 152 cm banquet round costs about 9 m², not the 1.8 m² its top covers. Those banquet numbers are the same pitch the Metis capacity engine packs to, so this page and the real layout generator agree with each other.
On top of that, a slice of the room is held back for circulation and fire routes before anything is placed. That is the reserve slider — gangways and exit routes exist whether the room is full or empty.
This is the part that catches people out. Thirty square metres left over sounds like plenty for a car until you find it is spread as a one-metre ribbon around the edge of the room. A car needs 4.8 × 1.85 m in one piece, plus room to walk round it, plus a door it fits through and a clear route to the spot.
That is why the calculator asks for length and width as well as area. Give it both and it stops doing arithmetic and starts doing a layout: it places every item into the rectangle to scale and then measures the biggest clear run that survives. If the area says yes and the shape says no, it tells you so.
Footprints come from the Metis furniture library; gaps are the working clearances used by the layout engine. "With access" is what one of them costs you in a packed room.
| Item | Size | Footprint | Gap (w × d) | With access |
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Vehicle dimensions are typical class sizes, not planner assets — check the actual vehicle, and the load-in door, before you promise anyone a car on the stand.
Ten 3 × 3 m shell scheme stands take about 135 m² once each has its share of a 3 m gangway, and six banquet rounds of 8 take about 55 m² with chairs and serving space. Against 300 m² less a 15% circulation reserve — 255 m² usable — that leaves roughly 65 m². Enough for a car, a bar and a registration desk, provided the leftover is in one piece and not scattered round the edges.
No — and it is not close. 500 sq ft is about 46 m². Ten banquet rounds alone want roughly 99 m², before the dance floor. The calculator will show you red long before the car question comes up. A car on display wants about 26 m² of its own once you allow a metre to walk round it.
A 3 × 3 m shell scheme stand is 9 m² of stand, but it cannot live on 9 m² of hall. Stands in a row share side walls, and face a gangway that is typically 3 m wide and shared with the row opposite — so about 1.5 m of gangway lands on each stand. That works out at roughly 13.5 m² of hall per 9 m² stand, a gross-to-net ratio of about 1.5:1. Add entrances, catering and fire lanes and most real halls run nearer 2:1.
Because you cannot sit at a table with no chairs, and you cannot get to the chairs with no gap behind them. A 152 cm round with eight banquet chairs needs a pitch of about 3 m centre to centre — the table, two chair depths, and 50 cm so guests and servers can pass behind a seated back. Cut that and you get the layout every venue has seen: a room that looks fine on paper and cannot be served.
For a seated dinner in a simple rectangular room, 10–15% is realistic. For an exhibition, a room with several entrances, or anywhere with a licence condition on aisle widths, use 20–25%. If your venue has a fire officer's plan with marked routes, use that instead of a percentage — those routes are not negotiable and they are rarely where you would have put them.
No. It treats the room as a clean rectangle, which is the honest limit of a web calculator. Pillars, bay windows, low beams, a stage that is already built and doors that swing inwards all take more than their area suggests. That is the point at which you want the real thing: Metis draws your actual room, obstructions and all, and generates layouts that work around them.
