INTERIOR DESIGN
Why lounge chairs are better than fajitas
A few years ago my husband bought himself a special Man Chair. It was upholstered in black leather and nobody else was allowed to sit on it — at least not while he was there. This left me with the sofa to recline upon, and plenty of room to stretch out my legs.
All was well… until his chair broke.
With hindsight the chair wasn’t particularly well designed. The wooden outer shell was attached to the leather cushion using a rubber shock mount — a weak point because, when the glue failed, the shell simply fell off.
Fortunately it didn’t break and can be glued back on (currently we are on the third attempt at reattachment, but that’s another story.) This created a problem, because in the absence of his chair he is sitting on my sofa.
It seems to me that sofas, despite being advertised as “three-seater,” are only suitable for one person. Really, who sits on the sofa with their feet on the floor, at the mercy of spiders and chilly draughts? Houses with cold wood or tiled floors are especially uncomfortable if you can’t prop your feet up.
So two of us are sitting on a three-seater sofa, and there simply isn’t room.
At first I resorted to putting my feet on top of him, but this still wasn’t comfortable and he complained, so eventually I huffed off downstairs to sit on the bed. I watch Netflix on the laptop while he watches the television upstairs, and we text each other instead of having a conversation. Hardly a picture of marital bliss!
This raises the question of truthfulness in advertising.
A three-seater sofa does not in fact accommodate three people in any level of comfort. Technically it accommodates three bottoms, but not three whole people. Let’s face it — nobody wants to share their seating arrangements, no matter how much they like the other person.
As Thoreau declared: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
So I sit in the bedroom by myself and watch a tiny screen, instead of being squashed on the sofa with my spouse in order to watch the big television.
This phenomenon of what I will call “serving inflation” is everywhere. Sofas claim to seat three people even though only one person can stretch out on them. A box of eight fajitas apparently serves four people but everyone knows you’ll eat it between two of you. Sweets are labelled as “sharing bags,” even though that’s the last thing anyone intends to do.
What’s worse is that we all know we’re being misled but we just seem to accept it. Perhaps it has something to do with this puritanical aversion to greed — we would be horrified if a huge bag of crisps was labelled “serves one” instead of “family size,” even though we frequently scoff a whole bag to ourselves.
There are in fact very few things which are actually sufficient for the number of people they claim to cater for. The humble lounge chair is one of these. Resolutely single-seater… at least until children and pets come along.
Happily, we may now have found a solution to the sofa dilemma in the form of footstools. Three bottoms can indeed sit comfortably on a sofa, as long as they have three footstools to put their legs up on (the topic of which footstool to select is a whole other ball game). In addition, the footstools can be relocated and used as seats when guests arrive.
Modularity and flexibility win the day again! Our new sofa arrives tomorrow, along with a matching footstool to resolve our sofa-sharing woes.
