Corner Settee

When I was a tyke I didn’t care about the proper name for our corner settee. I just wanted to sit in the thing and watch telly. Now that I’m a grown man, I still don’t care and I still just want to relax in front of the telly. It is truly amazing how things change over the years. The wife had other plans though, and I’m wondering if I would have been happier being alone and miserable. Still, here we are and buying some new furniture for the home as it were. I don’t like to go at anything half-arsed so I decided to use my laptop for something other than a drink coaster and learn a thing or two about sofas.

So the first thing I learn is that a two seater is called a love seat. I suppose I can understand that, as I don’t particularly like sitting on a small-ish one with another bloke if alternative seating options are available in the room. I also discovered that a corner settee is called a “sectional”. Maybe in the states it is, not in my neighborhood. That should have been enough to get me going, but to my horror I was swept into a world of unnecessary naming conventions for cushioned seats.

I’m pretty sure I’d heard of a chaise lounge before, but didn’t know it was a long couch with a single armrest on one side. The others I had never heard of. A divan, is basically just a couch with no sides. Yea, apparently in the middle east they used to throw a mattress against the wall and say, “Hey mate, that’s a couch” and at some point someone else said, “No, what you have there is a Divan”. Brilliant. Later, someone put legs on the thing, lucky thing that they didn’t make up another name to help clear up any confusion about the legged vs. legless varieties.

Then there was the “fainting couch”. This is the one you’ll see in some old, wealthy homes. It has the back raised on one side and looks quite fancy. And today you can have that couch available near your window in your conservatory, so someone doesn’t pull down window coverings like some type of ez fit blinds for conservatories.  Apparently this was popular when women wore corsets because they’d have the things done so tight they would get to the top of the staircase and literally feel like they were about to faint. Who knew sofa history could be so disturbing? At this point I wasn’t terribly keen to discover what “chesterfield” was, so I gave up. There’s really no point in these others anyhow, all you really need is a big, comfy corner settee and whatever will fill the rest of the space, right?