The argument was technically about linen versus velvet and it ran for the better part of a year, until someone dragged out the office chair from the spare room, the one with the linen seat that’s gone shiny and flat in the exact shape of whoever sits in it longest, and just pointed. Nobody’s argued since. Well, almost nobody.
That’s the thing about velvet, it hides the evidence. We’ve had the armchair in the front room for three years now, through two dogs, one very committed toddler phase of standing on the arm to reach the bookshelf, and an unknowable number of Sunday afternoons where someone falls asleep in it with a mug going cold on the floor. The seat still bounces back. Not perfectly, there’s a slight give where the same person always sits, but it’s not the sad crater you get with the cheaper foam, it’s more like the chair remembering you fondly.
We tried other things first, obviously, because that’s what we do, we buy the wrong one and then complain about it for years as a kind of penance.
There was a boucle version that looked incredible in photos and felt, in person, like sitting on a loofah. There was a leather one that half the group loved and the other half found cold in winter and sweaty in summer, which is a genuinely difficult combination to achieve.
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The velvet won because it does the thing none of the others managed, it looks dressed up and feels like you’re allowed to put your feet on it anyway.
The color hides stains in a way that should probably worry us more than it does. One of us spilled an entire glass of red on the arm within the first month and spent a week braced for the mark to show up like a guilty conscience. It never did. We’re choosing to see this as a feature rather than a warning sign about our own habits.
The arms are where the disagreement that hasn’t been settled lives now. Half the room wants them low and rolled so you can drape a leg over sideways, the other half wants them proper and upright so you can actually rest a book on one without it sliding into the abyss between cushion and armrest. Nobody’s produced a counterexample dramatic enough to end that one yet. We suspect it never gets solved, we just keep buying chairs that lean one way or the other and let the collection argue for itself.
What we will all agree on, even the linen holdout who’s gone quiet on that front, is that it’s the chair people gravitate to first when they come round, before anyone’s said anything about it. That’s not something you can really argue your way out of, no matter how good your counterexample is.
