chair and a half sectional
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camilla dining-lounge grey chair cushion elysse chair with natural cushion elysse natural chair cushion valalta rocking chair with cushion valalta rocking chair cushion sophia black dining chair lucinda black stacking chair lucinda mint stacking chairFurniture has been bulking up for several years now, partly to match the scale of all the cavernous “great rooms” that became must-haves in new homes (and perhaps also to match expanding waistlines). But big furniture seems to have reached a critical mass of comical massiveness. One tipoff that the scale of a couch might be a bit out of whack? When you start comparing it to a large farm animal. Home stores these days, especially mass-market retailers, are filled with enormous furniture: coffee tables big enough to land an airplane on and “luxe depth” sofas with sink-in cushions that could easily double as guest beds. Even high-end European brands like Poltrona Frau and Ligne Roset are selling bulky Chesterfield sofas and sectionals that seem to stretch into infinity.
These pieces dwarf the furniture of an earlier era, or even the more modest designs elsewhere in furniture stores today. At Raymour & Flanigan, the East Coast furniture chain, a chair from the Briarwood collection by HM Richards is equal in width to Le Corbusier’s LC2 love seat, designed in the late ’20s and sold by Design Within Reach. (The “chair and a half” version is nearly as big as the LC2 couch.) With its stout profile and rolled arms, the Briarwood chair is a throne for the King of Sunday Afternoon. “I was just shocked,” said Thomas Hine, the culture and design writer, recalling his visits to furniture stores in suburban Philadelphia a few years ago as he searched for a chair. “I was appalled by how incredibly large furniture had gotten. I had no idea.” Richard Wright, who runs the Chicago-based auction house Wright, which specializes in slimmer midcentury furniture, is also puzzled by the scale of today’s furniture. “It’s very odd to me,” he said.
“Sofas are ponderously deep now, as are chairs. I find deep seating very uncomfortable. You feel like a little kid.” One of the most prominent retailers of supersize furnishings is Restoration Hardware, the California-based chain whose leather steamer trunks and machine-age desks suggest that the Indiana Jones estate is being liquidated. In its fall catalog, the company says its most recent line was partly inspired by the baronial spaces of 18th-century France. Consider the Versailles chair, with its winged sides and cocoon-ish overhang that reaches a full five feet in height. The design is intended to “fend off drafts in the grand chateaux of France,” the catalog explains. Unless you actually own a drafty chateau, though, you’re just as likely to feel like that old Lily Tomlin character Edith Ann when you sit in it. “The strange thing is, you would likely need to live out in the suburbs to have the space for that furniture, but it seems the aesthetic is fairly urban,” said Claire Zulkey, who has thought a lot about Restoration’s Old-World-Europe-meets-steampunk look.
Last summer, Ms. Zulkey, a writer who lives in Chicago, carried the Restoration catalog with her on a road trip and began musing on what the furniture might suggest about a mythical population living inside the store. On her blog, she theorized that “the people who live at Restoration Hardware are either very big, and thus enjoy furniture and accessories proportionate to their largeness, or they’re petite, and enjoy feeling dwarfed by their home décor.” The company declined to comment for this article, other than to say that it offers furniture in various scales and sizes. Annie Elliott, an interior designer in Washington, said she battles against giant furniture and generally advises clients not to buy it. “It doesn’t look right, it’s sloppy and probably too big for whatever room they’re putting it in,” Ms. Elliott said. She recalled one client who insisted on buying the Dr. Pitt sectional sofa by Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams. “It’s U-shaped, but they sell ottomans that are the same seat height as the couch, so you can push it in and make a raft,” Ms. Elliott said.
The sectional was to go into a dining area that the client was converting to a family room. “They pay me to save them from themselves,” Ms. Elliott said. “I suggested something more in scale so you could have a reading chair and maybe a place to put your drink.” But the client insisted, and the sofa took up so much space that nothing else fit in the room. “There wasn’t room for a floor lamp,” Ms. Elliott said. “We mounted lights on the walls.” When Mr. Williamson put his bovine couch in his family room, it instantly dwarfed the other pieces. He set out on a quest to find a table scaled to match the couch, he said, and eventually bought “a behemoth of a coffee table that weighs 300 pounds.” The appeal of both the coffee table and the couch is that they are childproof and seemingly indestructible. He added: “I can stand on top of the coffee table, and it won’t even think about budging or breaking. And I stand on it quite often. Neighbors come over and I’m always showing them, ‘Look, I can stand on this coffee table.’
In some cases — particularly in New York, where doorways and elevators are narrow — big pieces bump up against simple laws of physics. Max Bar-Nahum, the director of sales and marketing at Dr. Sofa, a Bronx-based company that specializes in the disassembly and reassembly of furniture, said he gets several calls a day from people who buy a couch or chair and discover it’s too big to deliver. The steel-frame couches made by B&B Italia and other modern designers bring him a lot of business. “You have no idea how big these sofas are,” Mr. Bar-Nahum said. Granted, it can be hard to gauge the size of furniture in a store, where the ceilings are often high and the showrooms loft-like. But retailers show no sign of dropping the biggest pieces from their lines, even at a time when many Americans are downsizing in response to the housing crash and recession. The median size of a new home, as of the third quarter of 2011, was 2,244 square feet, down from 2,308 square feet in 2006, said David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Homebuilders.
He added that the square footage should level off at about 2,200 — a trend line that hardly screams Texas depth. “The underlying reason is that people like it and they buy it,” said Russell Bienenstock, editor in chief of Furniture World, a trade magazine, explaining the prevalence of oversize furniture. “You have to assume retailers are re-ordering what is selling well.” Michelle Enders, a senior buyer for Raymour & Flanigan, said the company carries a range of styles and sizes, but sales of sectionals, in particular, have been booming in the last two years. “They make a lot of sense,” Ms. Enders said. “They maximize your seating area, and in the larger great rooms, they help to break the room up.” Especially in McMansions, which still populate the suburbs like domestic mastodons. “Look at the home inventory,” said Bill Quirk, the president of HM Richards, the company that makes the Briarwood chair and its supersize chair-and-a-half sibling. “People still need to furnish the big homes that were built.
It’s not like all of a sudden furniture will change.” Mr. Quirk discovered firsthand how his company’s seating looks inside a smaller home. “I rented a place down in Naples, Fla., that had one of our chaises in it, and it took up the whole den,” he said. “I thought, ‘This thing is wildly out of proportion for this beach house.’ Still, he observed, in a more-spacious home, a big chair takes the place of a formal love seat and fits better with the casual way that people live. And wall-mounted flat-screen TVs have eliminated media centers, creating more space for seating. For homeowners with what The New Yorker writer Tad Friend once called “relaxed fit” tastes, overlarge, cushiony seating is equated with comfort. “People want the furniture to be more comfy,” Ms. Enders said. “The more contemporary furniture, which has lower seating with firmer backs — I don’t understand how the Europeans use that furniture.” Ms. Elliott, the Washington interior designer, said she heard the same comfort-is-king refrain from the client who bought the Dr. Pitt sectional.