Armchairs

Choosing the right wooden or fabric armchair for your living room

An armchair does different work to a sofa. Set opposite one, it makes the arrangement that turns a room from furnished into inviting, and it gives one person somewhere to settle without taking the room over. What separates our armchairs from each other is not the footprint, which barely moves: most sit between 66cm and 86cm wide. It is the seat.

Seat depth runs from 46cm on the Casey to 70cm on the Long Island, and those 24cm decide what the chair is for. A shallow seat holds you upright, which is what a reading chair or a chair beside a window wants. A deep seat asks you to sit back into it and stay. Seat height does similar work: the Matilda and Madeleine sit at 40cm, and the Walter and Eliza at 50cm, and the higher seat is noticeably easier to rise from.

The wooden armchairs sit at the upright end. The Wycombe's solid oak frame and woven paper rush seat come from Morris and Co's Sussex Chair, by way of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Casey takes the spindle design of the classic Windsor chair and adds feather-wrapped cushions, so it reads as a wooden chair and sits like an upholstered one.

Among the upholstered armchairs, the Theo is the most upright at a 66cm backrest, and the Shoreditch and Walter sit between. The Olivia and Eva give the deepest seats at 61cm and 60cm, and the
Long Island goes deeper still beneath a loose linen slipcover. The Cleo turns on a 360-degree swivel above a hidden metal plinth. Where space is tight, the armless Madeleine is 55cm wide, and where one chair is not enough, the Long Island and Olivia are both made as loveseats. The same designs run wider through our sofas.

How our armchairs are made

Every armchair here begins as solid timber. The upholstered designs are built on kiln-dried tulipwood, held with traditional reinforced halving joints and upholstered by hand, with serpentine
springs carrying the seat. The frame is carved to shape first, so the arms and back are cut from the timber rather than built up from a basic form with foam around it, which is the more common shortcut. It is why a Neptune armchair keeps its line after years of use rather than slowly losing it.

The wooden designs are solid oak instead. The Wycombe and Casey frames are protected with Natural Oak IsoGuard®, our penetrative timber treatment, and the Casey carries exposed fox tenon joints in the Arts and Crafts manner. On the Eliza, where the oak rail and turned legs are on show, the legs are given the same IsoGuard® protection.

Seat cushions are built around a foam core wrapped in feather and fibre, so the seat settles rather than flattens. Fabric choice is wide on most designs, from around 24 to 28 options spanning wool, linen, Harris Tweed, cotton velvet, boucle and leather. The Long Island is the deliberate exception, offered in 15 linen and cotton-linen weaves so the slipcover keeps its falling line. The frames carry our lifetime guarantee.