Try Talking the Talk

For a descriptive writer, the prospect of setting a scene can really get the juices flowing as there is endless scope for painting vivid pictures with words - bliss for the author, but sometimes uphill work for the poor reader.   If I'm finding the going a little tough in a book that I'm reading, it is always the descriptive passages that I'm tempted to skip, and you never want to put anyone in a position where they feel inclined to stray.

Proceed with caution.

Description should never exist purely as an end in itself - it should always have another agenda as well: throwing light on character, creating atmosphere, breaking the tension, providing a contrast -- whatever. If description exists only for its own sake, you run the risk of telling the reader something rather than showing it happen, one of the cardinal sins of creative writing.

To save yourself from this, try writing a scene in which the setting is conveyed solely through dialogue.  In this way, you will not only create an impression of the location itself, but also the characters' attitudes to it. Have they been there before? Is it sympathetic?  Threatening? Does it give one person an advantage over the other (that territorial/home ground thing)? Does it provoke boredom, or provide an escape?  Is it inviting or alienating? Each character could have a different response to it which would give you even more potential to exploit.  In this way, rather than offering a straight description of a room, or a house, or a street, or a garden, you incorporate this into your characters' experience of it, and of each other within it, so that your readers can involve themselves in something with more complexity and depth.  Result!