Sofas

Choosing the right fabric sofa

A fabric sofa gets more hours of use than anything else in a sitting room, which makes the choice less about how it photographs and more about how comfortable it still feels at the end of a long day. There are seven designs here, and each one started somewhere different.

The Long Island came home with our founders from the East Coast of America, and it has kept that easy, generously proportioned line, with loose covers falling to the floor in a soft skirt. The Eliza began at an auction house, where our design director, Fred, found an Edwardian sofa with an exposed frame built to be looked at from every side. That idea survived into the finished piece: an exposed oak rail and turned oak legs, so the Eliza can sit in the middle of a room rather than apologising against a wall. The Olivia is the English classic of the group, deep-seated under a sweeping double-arched backrest. The George is its more formal relation, scrolled and pin-tucked and drawn in slimmer, and it shares the Olivia's turned oak legs on brass castors.

Three designs sit more upright. The Eva runs a line of antique-style studs around a crisp, tall-backed silhouette, its arms sloping and set back from the seat. The Shoreditch is the most architectural of them, clean-lined and full-armed. And the Lottie takes its cue from the Chesterfield, buttoned across the back with high, tucked arms.

How our sofas are built

Underneath the cover, every sofa here begins as a kiln-dried tulipwood frame, with birch plywood used alongside it on most of the designs. Kiln drying matters more than it sounds. Timber dried to a stable moisture content before it is cut will not move once it is living in a heated house, and a frame that moves is a frame that creaks.

The joints are cut, not screwed. Traditional halving joints run through most of the range, two lengths of timber notched and lapped so the load travels through the wood itself. The Eliza is the exception, with mortise-and-tenon joints running from rail to leg, because its frame is on show and the joinery had to be worth looking at.

Seats are carried on serpentine springs, which run in a continuous S-shape across the frame rather than being tied in rows, so support follows the entire seat rather than gathering wherever the filling happens to be thickest. Everything above them is upholstered by hand, which is the slower way to do it, and it is why the shape you sit on in a showroom is the shape that arrives.

Why our cushions are filled the way they are

There are two easy ways to fill a seat cushion, and we use neither. Foam alone holds its shape and gives very little back. Feather alone sinks beautifully and then stays sunk, which is why a wholly feather-filled cushion asks to be plumped every time somebody stands up. Working with upholstery specialists, our team landed on a third answer: a foam core for structure, wrapped in feather for the give, with fibre blended through on most designs to hold the loft between sittings.

It is a slower cushion to build and a more expensive one to fill. What it buys is a seat that settles rather than flattens, and that still has a shape to it after ten years of Sunday afternoons.