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Why are most sofas so bad?

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Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#191

Post by TylerE »

plugin-baby wrote: post #84
amluto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had multiple fancy chairs, purchased from a famous high end brand with a very high end showroom in a very high end design center, fail very quickly. The failure was due to their vendor (fancy, in France) using nice solid finger jointed hardwood, well finished, in a place where that construction was completely inappropriate. High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades. Nice material…

Where is hardwood inappropriate? Genuinely curious to know

I think he meant "place" as in literally "the location on the furniture" rather than the (very reasonable from context) interpretation I suspect we both had that it mean "place" in the geographic, or at least climatic sense. Which is itself important as certain woods deal with extremes of humidity better than others. In a temperate climate, just about any old wood will do, but somewhere that is very dry OR very wet, woods like mahogany and teak are best.

Teak especially is so good at dealing with water that it was harvested to near extinction in the 19th century just to build ship's decks and cabins out of it.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#192

Post by doctorpangloss »

mrguyorama wrote: post #86
nerdponx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if it wasn't bad enough that most consumer goods have completely bifurcated into "junk" and "luxury", now it's hard to even tell which products fall into which category, because there is so much junk now being sold as luxury.

>junk now being sold as luxury. That's always been the case though. There has always been junk marketing itself as "luxury" to milk the nouveau riche. It's not like real Coach bags utilize some magic leather that doesn't degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan. It's not like the brick that Supreme sold was made of some sort of magical clay. The luxury purse companies don't burn th…

> degrade just the same as the $200 leather purse you buy from a local artisan.

Where are there local artisans selling leather purses they made for $200? Are you sure you don't mean $4,000? Surely if you are buying a $200 hand made purse, it was made by hand in a low labor cost country and relabeled.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#193

Post by schneems »

angry_moose wrote: post #9

I've posted about our ~$2000 West Elm sofa that disintegrated within 2 years in a similar previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37393399 The whole thing is just stapled together OSB. I ripped the dust cover off and added 3 new frame stretchers made from 2x8 construction lumber (and tied other loose joints back together) and its done pretty well since then: https://imgur.com/a/bqlLgW3 (wish I'd gotten…

About 8 or so years ago my wife and I were really excited to buy our first “adult” piece of furniture (read, not-ikea). And we found a leather sofa we loved the look of at West Elm. But it really sucked. Thankfully we had another room that needed to be furnished and we threw it in there. But the thing was just not comfortable and the pillows started sagging after minimal use.

Since then almost every other couch we got was from ikea, since if it ended up sucking at least we didn’t pay 2-3x the cost for it. Which is sad really, I want a nice couch. I just don’t that paying 10-20x the cost wind just be a piece of junk.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#196

Post by mycologos »

readingnews wrote: post #140
justinlloyd wrote: post #82

Last time I bought a couch, a new one, it set me back $6,000. It took me the better part of eight months to find it. Solid wood. Proper joinery. Thick padding. Pig skin leather. We kept it for 20 years before giving it to some friends who had it reupholstered where I expect it will last another 20 years. I used to have some expensive, but ultimately crap, book cases. Book cases are not designed by people who own a lo…

>> it set me back $6,000. The issue is that most modern households in the U.S. can not hack that kind of pricetag for a sofa / couch. Hell, I could never spend that kind of jack on a couch, even if I literally saved up for it (which would take years)... it is just far too much of a percentage of my income for one furniture item. So, how do we solve that issue (e.g. its good, but if it is 10% of your gross annual inco…

I read a book about chairs a few months ago, and one bit from it is

> Eighteenth-century furniture was expensive. At a time when a journeyman joiner earned three livres a day, a good-quality armchair might cost as much as a hundred livres.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#197

Post by jahewson »

amluto wrote: post #44
nerdponx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if it wasn't bad enough that most consumer goods have completely bifurcated into "junk" and "luxury", now it's hard to even tell which products fall into which category, because there is so much junk now being sold as luxury.

I’ve had multiple fancy chairs, purchased from a famous high end brand with a very high end showroom in a very high end design center, fail very quickly. The failure was due to their vendor (fancy, in France) using nice solid finger jointed hardwood, well finished, in a place where that construction was completely inappropriate. High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades. Nice material…

Finger jointed hardwood is not a nice material. It’s short bits of knotty new-growth wood chopped up and glued back together.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#198

Post by bombcar »

resolutebat wrote: post #189
dylan604 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality ain't cheap, and cheap ain't quality. In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything Anything decent doesn't really start until ~$1k, and anything in the $3k range you mentioned starts to become heirloom quality. As with anything, these are YMMV, but serves as a fast basis for my experience

Unfortunately the premise of the article is that you can now easily drop $1k+ on a sofa that looks good on Instagram, but is constructed of particleboard and falls apart when you look at it sideways.

You can drop way more than $1k and be stuck with something that's really kind of crappy.

You have to know enough to know who is actually building the good stuff, and who is building good-looking marketing.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#199

Post by mycologos »

mikeInAlaska wrote: post #165

Any opinions on Ekornes sofa from Norway?

My parents got one 15 years ago and it's still in great condition with no real effort on their part. I have no idea what has changed at Ekornes in that timespan though, for all I know they got acquired by private equity and turned to crap.

Re: Why are most sofas so bad?

#200

Post by bombcar »

plugin-baby wrote: post #84
amluto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had multiple fancy chairs, purchased from a famous high end brand with a very high end showroom in a very high end design center, fail very quickly. The failure was due to their vendor (fancy, in France) using nice solid finger jointed hardwood, well finished, in a place where that construction was completely inappropriate. High quality Scandinavian-style plywood probably would have lasted decades. Nice material…

Where is hardwood inappropriate? Genuinely curious to know

Plywood is amazingly structurally sound, because it's got grain going all which ways.

Especially when thin, wood is surprisingly easy to break, and it doesn't handle being pulled on very well at all.

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