A state-of-the-art review, spanning the last two decades, on application of metaheuristic methods in facility layout problems (FLPs) to gauge the current and emerging trends involving new design objectives, algorithms and methodologies to the combinatorial optimisation aspects is presented in this work. Fresh developments in emerging layout research, as analysed in this study, provide a perspective on what the future of the field will be like. A tendency of using metaheuristics, such as genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), ant colony optimisation (ACO) and particle swarm optimisation (PSO) with a trend towards multi-objective approaches to layout and material handling system design is observed.