The green velvet sofa has lived in five spots in this house and we are not exaggerating for effect, we counted. It started under the window, which lasted about a fortnight before someone pointed out the morning sun was turning it a slightly alarming shade of lime. Then it went against the back wall, which was fine until it blocked the radiator and we spent a January arguing about whether furniture or warmth mattered more. One of us thinks it belongs diagonally across the corner, at an angle, like it’s doing something interesting. Another thinks a sofa at an angle in a room this size just means you walk into it in the dark, and has the bruised shin to prove it.
Nobody agrees on what the sofa is even for, day to day. One of us wants it kept as the good seat, the one you save for when someone’s actually visiting, cushions plumped, throw folded just so.
Another treats it as the place you flop into face first after a bad day, shoes still on, felt tip incident from three years ago still faintly visible on the arm if you know where to look.
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Both of those people live in the same house and use the same sofa and have never once resolved this.
Guests, to be fair, love it. It photographs well, it feels expensive under a hand even though it wasn’t, and it does that thing velvet does where it looks slightly different depending on which way you’re standing, which people always comment on like they’ve discovered something. What guests don’t see is the toddler who uses it as a launch pad, the dog who’s decided the low arm is basically a pillow, and the fact that velvet shows a water ring if you so much as think about a mug near it without a coaster. We learned that one the hard way, twice, because apparently once wasn’t enough.
It’s survived two moves, one of which involved getting it down a stairwell at an angle nobody thought was physically possible, and it came out the other side with one small snag near the back cushion that only shows if you’re looking for it. The frame underneath is solid enough that flopping into it properly, the full body collapse kind, doesn’t produce that horrible bounce cheaper sofas give you, and honestly that’s the whole review right there.
We still haven’t landed on a permanent spot. It’s currently against the back wall again, radiator be damned, because someone recently pointed out that a sofa you can actually sit on in winter beats one that merely looks good in a corner nobody sits in. That argument isn’t over. It’s just paused, the way most of our furniture arguments are, until the next time someone decides the room needs “freshening up,” which is our house’s actual code for moving the sofa again.
