Look! This room has no ceiling! Ahhh! But nice corner sofa, isn't it?

Three piece suite or corner settee? Some people get concerned about fabric and style nonsense when looking for sofas. That’s something to consider with interior decorating or home improvement projects, but to my mind it is not the first by any stretch of the imagination. When picking sofas for your flat the number one thing to think about is how you are going to use them. So you’re thinking, “I’m going to sit on them”. Brilliant. Not all of them at once I hope? No, you don’t select living room seating for your own personal uses, it should be selected based on the company you keep.

A three piece suite, the three seater sofa, two seater, and matching chair, is a bit more formal. Or maybe classy is the right word. It’s the preferred option if you envision your living room as a place where perhaps other couples (assuming you are in a couple as well) will come over and chat over wine and cheese. Not only does it look more traditional but it is more functional for that purpose. You can move the seats around to form three sides of a rectangle, put a little table in the middle and voila! You have a great environment for conversation.

On the other hand, if you’re building your living room around the telly, you might want to go for the corner settee. Whether you’re throwing back some pints while watching sport with your mates or having a few pints with friends during a fierce round of Call of Duty on your Xbox, the sectional sofa is going to be your best bet. It typically seats as many as a three piece set (usually 6) or more, and doesn’t waste valuable corner space with silly end tables with fancy lamps that are just going to get knocked over when you hook the Wii up.

Material is something to consider as well. As a general rule, leather is easier to clean, but fabric can look nicer. You see where I’m going with this now? If you’re leaning towards a three piece suite, you might also consider leaning towards fabric. If instead you find yourself drawn to the sectional sofa, leather might be the smart way to proceed. It all comes down to wine and cheese vs. beer and crisps. Then again, wine does tend to stain terribly so you might actually want leather all around. Come to think of it, stick with the corner settee also, and the beer.

In an understandable turn of fate the futon has become incredibly popular, perhaps more popular than the ubiquitous corner settee. Why not? After all, they are cheap and you can use them to sleep on, or to sit on. There is a dark side to futons however. Actually, no. Just having laugh. Though not a dark side per say, futons are inferior to the traditional sleeper sofa in a number of crucial ways.

The first thing to consider is comfort. If you are having a relative or even a friend stay over, it’s not proper to have them stay on a futon. They’re narrow and not terribly comfortable. Most of them don’t even have a proper mattress, just a stuffed bit of cotton. A sleeper sofa on the other hand offers a much larger bedding area, usually with some springs underneath to make sleeping on it better than simply bearable. Offer your guests something they can stretch out on.

If you have a couple stay over, your parents for instance, then it would be incredibly rude for you to force them into separate beds. Especially tiny separate futon beds. No, what you want is a big corner settee with a section that pulls out into a double bed. You might be thinking that you have a guest bedroom so you don’t really need a sleeper sofa. Bollocks. Turn that guest bedroom into a home office, a martial arts dojo, or a video game dungeon for yourself and stuff your parents on the couch.  Yes indeed – that is why you bought that corner sofa after all.

Now, let’s say you’re young and the only likely house guests you’re likely to have spending the night are a bunch of drunk mates. Well, again sleeper sofas win. You can only realistically fit one mate per futon but you can cram about three or four drunk ones onto a double bed. You’re saving space and money all at once since you’re going to have at least one sofa anyway and now you don’t need to buy six futons for Barry, Larry, George, Benny, Bart and Bret. Four on the double bed, one on the floor, one in the tub and there you go.

If you’re not yet convinced about the superiority of sleeper sofas over their tiny futon cousins then consider this: Your sofa is in front of the telly. Your telly is hooked up to your console gaming system of choice. Having a sleeper sofa means you can play Xbox in bed. Call of duty just seems that much more realistic from the prone position, and sitting while repeatedly pressing a button can get tiresome. So what are you waiting for? Get that corner settee you’ve always wanted with the pullout bed.

If you spend most nights in front of the TV on your corner settee eating crisps then you probably already know, although perhaps don’t want to think about, the fact that sofas sometimes need cleaning. If you were wearing a particular shirt for a week straight without cleaning it people would think you were mad. Or at least slovenly. Yet, here we are sitting on the same bit of fabric or leather night after night (even eating on it!) and most of us let it go months or more without a proper cleaning. Don’t make excuses that a sofa isn’t the same as a shirt because you’re not sitting on it bare arsed. I assume you wear undergarments beneath your pants, it doesn’t make going a fortnight in the same pair of blue jeans any less disturbing to contemplate.

Like clothing, not all sofas are made of the same material and so they need to be cleaned differently. Leather is easiest to clean, but there are even different types of leather and some are more sensitive than others to chemicals. So pay proper attention when cleaning a leather corner settee.  No matter what your sofa is made out of, discoloration is something you will need to consider. That, and the manufacturer’s warranty. If your sofa is still under warranty then call up the manufacturer and ask them what cleaning products are acceptable. You’ll want the model and style numbers from your sofa. These can sometimes be found on the bottom, so you may need to turn it over. If you have a corner settee it won’t be fun but there is likely to be a label under there somewhere.

Actually, even for older sofas you should probably give the manufacturer a ring and find out what they have to say about cleaning their product. If you’ve got microfiber then you’re going to need to be triply careful and expert advice from the people who make it is usually a good bet. Other fabrics range from cotton to wool, although many cloth sofas are also made with synthetic fibers of some sort or other. Every company has their own formula for “polyester” so cleaning recommendations may also vary. There are also stores online that offer specific cleaning solutions, ranging from the type of fabric to the type of stain.

Mainly, take care of your sofa. Something you use every day that is an important part of your routine should never be taken for granted. Spend some time to take care of the things you love so they can take care of you. That corner settee might just last a few years longer if you give it proper care before it gets too worn down.

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?

Stripped Settee

First, you’ll need to turn over the settee so you can begin removing the leather. Of course if it’s a larger corner settee you’ll have to separate the pieces and reupholster them individually. It will be more of an undertaking because of the larger size as well. Take a flat screwdriver to remove the staples. If there is any kind of stuffing or batting underneath where the leather was, take a look to see if it needs replacement. If it does then this will have to be replaced as well. Now that you’ve take off the leather outer, and either left or replaced the batting, it’s time to ad your new leather. Take the old leather covering and find it to the new leather. The old leather covering is your template for the new one, so that you can cut out the right form and shape. Make sure you have a good sharp pair of scissors for this, to cut cleanly.

Now that you’ve cut your pattern exactly as the old one, take out all of the pins. Now take the rear portion and staple it on the top of the settee if a leather back, or on the back underside of the seat, if just the seat is leather and the back is wood. Turn over the settee and staple the leather all along the bottom. Now flip it back over to upright and hang the leather on the front, flip it again and staple on the bottom. If your settee has arms, cover them with the new leather and staple them on the inner and outer portions of the arms. Also tuck under the front of the arms and staple under there as well. You have now re-upholstered your settee. If your settee is very large like a corner settee, it can be done by you though it will require more care and work, you may want to seek a professional reupholstering service for it. Hopefully this article was useful in tell you how to properly reupholster your settee.