That’s something you can’t control. You can control the order, which will determine where they go. But if home assistant thinks it cannot fit a second column, it will not fit a second column.
I’m pretty sure it puts everything in a vertical until it needs a second column to fit an object. Once it needs the second column, it will start throwing things over there.
EDIT: There is a method to the madness, but it’s something you shouldn’t worry about. If you REALLY want to change it, you need to move to a custom ui. You have alittle more control with lovelace:
If you don’t like that, you could try this new tile UI that a guy recently built. It is more complicated to setup though:
And lastly, you could always move to appdaemon and it’s dashboard: