How to Choose the Perfect Sofa

Ten o’clock on a weeknight, a film halfway through, and a good many sofas in this country have somebody lying across them sideways with a cushion wedged behind the neck. That’s how most people actually use a sofa. It’s rarely how they sat on it in the shop, where everyone perches bolt upright for thirty seconds and says it’s very comfortable.

Choosing a sofa comes down to two things people rarely test in the shop: how deep the seat is for the way you actually sit, and what the cushions are made of. Shape and colour matter too, of course, but you can live with a colour you have gone off. A seat that is the wrong depth for your legs, or foam that gives up by the second summer, you can’t.

Sit the way you sit at home

So when you try one in our showrooms, we’d ask you to misbehave a little. Take your shoes off if you like and lie along it with your feet up. Ten minutes, ideally, because the first minute on any sofa is pleasant.

Seat depth is where most of the arguments between couples start. Around 55 centimetres keeps you upright with your feet on the floor, which suits shorter people and anyone who reads or works on the sofa; past 60 it turns into a lounging sofa, wonderful for tall people and a bit like being swallowed for everybody else. When two of you come in different sizes, buy the deeper seat and add a firm cushion behind the shorter back. The other way round doesn’t work.

Arm height matters if anyone naps there (too low and your head hangs off the end), and a back that stops below the shoulder blades looks elegant in the catalogue and gets tiring by the second episode of anything.

What is inside the cushions

This is the question we wish more people asked, and the one some sellers would rather they didn’t.

Most good seat cushions have foam at the core, and the figure that tells you how long it will last is density rather than firmness. A dense foam can feel soft or firm, but it keeps its shape for years; a light one feels lovely in the shop and sinks into a hollow wherever you always sit. Ask for the density. If nobody can tell you, that is an answer of a kind.

Feather wrapped round the foam gives the softer, slightly lived-in look and wants plumping now and then. All-feather cushions look wonderful in photographs and, the rest of the time, as though somebody has just got up from them, which some people love. Under the cushions, pocket springs in the seat are the other sign of a sofa built to last.

Then the covers. Covers that zip off can be cleaned properly and, one day, replaced while the frame stays, which is most of what we argued in sustainable decoration. If they are sewn on, ask why. Looking after them from week to week is in our notes on furniture care.

Fabric here deserves a thought about the light, and about the beach. A sofa beside a south-facing window fades on the arm nearest the glass, and solution-dyed fabrics hold out against that far longer than anything dyed on the surface. Linen is cool in August and creases the moment you look at it, which is either charm or irritation depending on who you are. Leather wipes clean and sticks to bare legs in July. And a light colour in a house five minutes from the sand will meet the sand, usually in the seams, so a textured fabric in a middle tone forgives a good deal more than smooth pale cotton.

Corners, sofa beds and the front door

A corner sofa commits the room. Decide which side the chaise goes before you fall for one, because left and right stop being interchangeable once it is in, and in an open-plan space the sofa often ends up doing the job of a wall, which we went into in open-plan living rooms.

Sofa beds are where we would ask you not to save. A cheap mechanism with a thin mattress gives your guests a metal bar across the back and gives you a sofa that is uncomfortable both ways. Here, where the spare bed is busiest in August, a good one earns its keep; for owners of rentals there is more in furnishing a holiday rental.

And measure the door. Then the lift, and the turn on the stairs, which in the older buildings of Albufeira can be tighter than anybody remembers. Tell us about the stairs when you order, since delivery and assembly is part of the service, and when a sofa simply won’t go in, or the room has an alcove nothing standard fits, made to measure is often the way out.

The sofas and armchairs collection is set up in both H&P Mobiliário e Decoração showrooms, in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra. Come and lie on them. Nobody will think it rude, and we’ll find you a cushion for behind your neck.