A room. A large Empire style sofa takes up the left part of the painting.

A Room with a Large Empire-Style Sofa presents furniture as the dominant presence in a domestic interior, with the sofa's bulk and period styling carrying as much pictorial weight as any human figure might. The Empire-style sofa would have been a nineteenth-century piece placed within the Strandgade apartment, and Hammershoi was sensitive to the way such inherited objects materialised historical duration within living space. The work dates to 1904, midway through the Strandgade period, and its current location is unrecorded. The sofa's identification in the title signals its importance: this is a painting about an object as much as a room.

A large piece of furniture occupying the left portion of the canvas creates an unusual compositional asymmetry. Hammershoi uses the sofa's mass to anchor the composition, balancing it against the open right side of the room with the characteristic geometric precision he applied to all interior subjects.