Twenty some years ago I used to work at a business that made and delivered sofas. They've got showrooms in key large cities in North America, fancy schmancy top end stuff.
The factory was a real place; the frames were made of solid wood and plywood, there was a sewing floor and even one (incredibly kooky) person whose sole job was to stuff the pillows. This guy was in a little room full of feathers all day, and they'd follow him around to the cantina and bathroom like a cartoon character.. but I digress.
My job there for a while was to make the sofa legs -- that was a sixteen step process, and they didn't even trust me to glue the boards together, just to do the cuts and shape the pieces. Sand and stain and wax and polish, yes sir!
They had a dedicated delivery crew, and what the article mentions about packaging is true -- things would be blanketed and wrapped up just the right way, then tetris-ed onto the truck. Sitting shotgun on that truck and hauling sofas up stairs and through various spaces was what I did after making the legs got too boring.
These sofas sold for $3000 ~ $4000 and up, and that was at the break of the millennium. I think the cheapest chair they had was around $2000. I should really swing by the showroom and see how much these are now -- and whether they're still made like they used to be.
You can still get made in the USA sofas with real hardwood, not rubber wood, which is fine, or worse, soft pine or particleboard or OSB) North Carolina was and is the center of solid wood furniture), and they still cost several to many thousands of dollars, and they will still last 100+ years with a couple reupholsterings or so, but most furniture comes from Asia now and is sold for 10x less, and is not worth reupholstering, and you will be lucky if it lasts 10 years.
The was a great company an old colleague of mine started called Interior Define that sourced custom furniture from China for a BluDot price but much higher quality, but they did not survive the pandemic and have since been sold in bankruptcy to a company that has reduced the quality to par
Having done a lot of DIY projects over the last decade, I've really shifted my view of OSB. Originally I would lump it in with particleboard, but I've since drastically changed my view of it. Particleboard is, truly, junk. OSB and plywood are both pretty good products, and for some uses superior to hardwoods (dimensional stability, for example). High quality plywoods are amazing products. OSB for structure or underlayments are really quite good.
Particleboard is absolutely useless, MDF is mostly useless except using as a guaranteed flat surface on top of something to support it, hardboard is pretty useful in certain applications though. OSB is great and extremely affordable as sheathing, and there's a massive variety of plywood that's great for their respective purposes - from cheap rough sheathing, mid-grade for shop projects and filling large gaps in furniture, all the way up to beautiful and supremely strong Baltic birch.
Avoid particleboard like a plague if you can afford it, appparently most of IKEA products now made of these since they are widely being used in dirt cheap furniture construction. They melt like ice once in contact with water. Recently, just had to chopped off all four legs of a bookshelf then replaced them with metal legs. The bookshelf legs somehow got damaged in contact with accumulated air-cond water droplets.
Ikea has two or three price points for each product. The cheapest will be made from chipboard or even cardboard. The most expensive varies, it might be pine or even something better.
IKEA's cheapened their offerings quite a bit over the years. Pre-pandemic, used to be you could buy a solid wood butcher block and solid wood cabinet doors and fronts. Now? The butcher block is particleboard with end grain themed veneer and the closest to solid wood cabinet hardware you'll get is a set of bamboo drawer fronts.
I have their solid wood butcher block (made from prisms of solid wood glued together) and a countertop made from the same material. When oiled to given instructions, both are pretty indestructible under normal use.
It's very sad that they're not made anymore. I guessed it just was not imported here due to its prohibitive cost, but not being able to find it on the other side of the pond is saddening.
I bought their highest end leather couch with a fold out bed a couple years ago, due to time constraints. I was very unhappy to see it was made from chipboard. Of course their shelves and such you can see what you are buying, but I would not trust anything upholstered myself.
(Though the oak version, which costs more, is oak-veneered particleboard.)
Many Ikea things aren't designed to last. That table has cross-beams, so it has a better chance surviving a party where someone leans heavily against one end of it. Something like Mörbylånga [2] looks like it would collapse.
I would give the furniture on display a good shove to see how sturdy it is.
I actually have the Mörbylånga table at home and I find it very sturdy. One thing which the pictures doesn't show is that there are two supporting beams under the table, which provides the necessary strength to not collapse on first touch. Obviously, I have not done the actual test, but I will try to remember and report back if the table ever breaks.
Tangential, but if your table doesn't break in the next few days then you won't be able to report back, since editing and replying to comments get disabled after some days. I don't know what the exact time frame is like though.
> their shelves and such you can see what you are buying
no you can't, the outside shell of each shelf completely hides what's inside. I wanted to reconfigure a shelf (turn it on it's side, combine it with another) and turns out the "boards" are hollow. There is something inside at the corner pre-drilled-screw anchor points, but that's the only place you can attach something, the rest of it is potemkin shelf. You get to see this in more detail if you keep a shelf in a mildly humid place like a beachhouse, as the whoe thing delaminates and you see cardboard honeycombs inside a thin veneer of ...veneer
One of the things that complicates this conversation is that people who are huge fans of some specific Ikea furniture model bought it X years ago, and in the meanwhile its construction methods have switched to something cheaper. The "same" product can be both good and bad, depending on the year it was made.
I feel like the thing to do is to give whatever you are looking at in the showroom a pretty good shake, and to sit down on it hard. If it's creaky or loose at all there, it'll fall apart in no time at home
For now it is holding up and "feels" sturdy after a couple years, but I have no doubt it will fail at least 5 years before I would otherwise expect it to (I would want 10 years, but now expect 5). My fault for trusting Ikea + higher end = good without further verification.
Ikea used to have price points for each product. It was my goto for butcher block countertops but they have since transitioned to offering only crappy all veneer spongeboard.[0]
Just finished a walkin closet cabinet (from kits) installation. All walls, floor to ceiling, veneered particleboard. Heavy, fragile, crumbly, weirdly hard. Rather nope. Blame the client.
I ended up doing MDF tops for my workbench (1" MDF over 3/4 plywood), and finished them with shelac for a protected, low-friction surface. It is still vulnerable to water damage, but not as bad as unfinished, and as a spoil layer it's not bad. It has plusses and minuses.
Seconded! I recently built a large 50" x 90" work surface in my garage and used MDO sign board (another phenolic resin product, not much more expensive than MDF and available at many construction-oriented lumber yards) for the top surface over top of a hardwood plywood subsurface and heavily milled Douglas Fir legs and trusses, all doweled and glued together. I've been quite happy. It was easy to use a router on to make channels for t-tracks, and has been quite stable for the past 6 months or so through the fall, winter, and spring weather changes with only an oil-filled radiant heater to keep things from getting too frigid.
Unless there is a drop of moisture, then you throw it all away.
You might not want to set foot in your kitchen or bathroom then. Generally speaking cabinets (in the US) use particleboard frames. Higher end stuff will use plywood.
I went with IKEA's Sektion cabinets to replace some forty year old particleboard cabinets that warped after years of water damage from a burst pipe. They came with a twenty-five year warranty so there's clearly some expectation of longevity.
Those are normally coated in melamine, even the edges, hence the ability to use them in a wet area. Ironically standard worktops are only coated on the top, so those can take damage.
I could be wrong, but isn't MDF basically made from the waste of wood products? I mean, it's graded and standarised. But MDF _is_ the waste. So to waste it again is no great loss.
But as with all things, I'm certain some producers are using raw/virgin materials. Probably from wood that is dirt cheap.
MDF is an engineered product comprised of homogenized hard and soft wood pulp, binding agents. It is dehydrated and pressed together to create a material that is of higher density than fiber board.
The amount of sawdust needed to create a sheet of this stuff is astronomical compared to the output, not to mention the manufacturing process being very resource intensive. You also cannot just take bags of sawdust from the wood mill - it must be macerated and ground to a very fine dust with roughly the consistency of flour.
The main advantage it has is that it is heavy (to weigh down furniture) and very easy to cut with bandsaws, mills, lasers, etc because of its uniform distribution of its constituent parts. It’s also good for applying vinyl wraps and edging which is one reason why arcade cabinets are often made from it.
All this for a product that is roughly the same price as A cabinet-grade ply:
...which means MDF is fine if it's entirely clad in a few mm of something more water-resistant, with the MDF just serving as structural infill. (This is how most kitchen cabinetry is made. And they put up with the steam from a pot boiling below them just fine.)
Our kitchen countertops are MDF covered in some sort of laminate. The laminate is great, but the MDF is swelling over our dishwasher and looks hideous. I'd be careful near moisture even if it's covered.
MDF for structural anything? That seems surprising, it's really weak and prone to sagging, and quite heavy. It's about the last thing I'd want to hang on a wall.
MDF is also great if you need homogeneous materials (for stuff like speaker cabinets). And for those more than sturdy enough, they are also always protected by some layer.
Yes. I went on a deep dive recently looking for the sweet spot in affordable speakers and subwoofers for near field and home theatre use, and noted that almost every top performer under 1000USD per unit used entirely MDF cabinets. The exception was the Monolith THX series by Monoprice that pay up for HDF and still do well at their price point.
OSB is much more nuanced than particle board, often in a bad way. Many manufactures orient the chips along a single axis, meaning it shares the anisotropic properties of solid wood where the X axis has a different strength and expansion rate than the Y axis. And looking at the 3rd dimension, the Z axis is actually quite weak. If you glue something to the face of an OSB board, you can break the joint fairly easily because the individual chips pull out.
The issue with OSB, unless you get the ECO one, is the formaldehyde. It's basically pieces wood glued together. And generally bad for air quality. A few might be okay, but I've seen entire startup buildings covered in it.
The sheer amount of glue used in OSB and other manufactured sheet wood is pretty gross unfortunately. They are functionally useful for certain use cases, I just can't get myself to reach for it over real lumber and joinery.
Others touched on it too, but I don't like all the chemicals in the wood or all the energy required to make it.
If I'm building something I try really hard to avoid it, I can only assume the dust is really toxic to breath in and I don't have money or space for a fancy dust collection system.
Agreed. The range on plywood is pretty drastic and most of us only use the bad stuff. I wonder how many of us with homes made in the last 20-30 years realize that most of our joists are engineered joists made of plywood (basically wooden I-beams).
The alternative is usually a truss which tend to bounce like a trampoline over long spans. The engineered I-joists are really good, and the rim joist from the same company is ridiculously tough.
I recently put shelving up in my garage and could not convince myself to use anything other than OSB. It was just so damn cheap - half the price of any plywood for the same thickness. The only cons are the appearance and screw holding ability (but its sitting on brackets so the latter doesn't matter much).
Baltic birch would be stronger, no doubt, but that's 3 times the price and I am not exactly storing a geode collection up there.
Room and Board makes very good furniture. When my wife and I moved into our new home a few years ago, we decided to invest in high quality furniture that would last decades. Originally we ordered a sofa from Interior Define that never arrived. Something wonky was going on with that company, many people never received their orders and they wouldn’t issue a refund. Thankfully we were still within the window to do a chargeback.
We have a sofa, coffee table, bed, nightstands, and some wall sconces from Room and Board. I am very impressed with the materials and build quality; I can tell everything will wear well and age nicely. Worth the investment, highly recommended.
I've never really enjoyed down cushions on a functional everyday couch. Feathers inevitably make they're way out of the pillow, through the cushion's exterior fabric and into your back/arm/leg/etc... or just around the room. They lose loft and aren't as easy to replace as say cutting a piece or two of foam and inserting those. My current couch has a down cushion on the top of the seated part and backrest and when they go I'll replace them with memory foam.
I got a Room and Board 65" Jasper in Cognac Leather right before the pandemic. I thought I was overpaying and it ended up sitting in shipping for 4 months because of lockdowns. I was predisposed to hate the thing but it's become one of my most reliable large purchases. Very solidly built. The leather has held up perfectly in front of bright windows.
Glad you mentioned this. When I did previous research before the quote that convinced me was that Room and Board couches have the highest resell value among furniture brands. I cannot find the source now but anecdotally it has appeared to be true.
I had a very good user experience ordering from Dreamsofa.com. They answered questions quickly, sent swatches, then sent more swatches when I needed more information, and their shipping tracking and notifications were helpful and accurate. The two guys from the shipping company they worked with were very nice. And I’m very happy with the sofa.
Yeah I have furniture from there mainly because it was the only showroom I could find that hide a wide selection + was mostly solid wood or veneered cabinet grade plywood.
The TV stand I bought from there shows no signs of warping a few years later and has had a 70 pound TV sitting on it the entire time.
The pricing was also pretty reasonable for solid walnut that was made in the USA.
Bought our sectional from a Bassett showroom almost 10 years ago. Extremely comfortable and the thing still looks brand new. Checked a few items on their website and found that they're still made in North Carolina.
We have a Bassett sectional going on almost 10 years too. Family friend'd mom worked for/with Bassett and got us a B2B price somehow - only caveat was I had to pick it up myself at the distribution warehouse in LA.
It's a fun memory renting a box truck, driving to the industrial heart of LA while listening to Will Wheaton narrate "Masters of Doom" to pick it up.
I have at least 20 various pieces of furniture from IKEA that have lasted more than 10 years, some even closing on 20, even after multiple moves to various college dorms. Dresser drawers, dining table, sofa, bed platform, sit stand desk, etc.
I do not think I have ever thrown something out for breaking. Maybe gets scuffed or scratched up or chipped, but you can mostly use one of those latex paint touch up markers and make the damage nearly invisible.
I agree with the comments below but would like to add that the IKEA of 10-20 years ago is not the IKEA of today. Many of their product lines have been made “more eco friendly” per their argument but in reality are cost saving measures. E.g wood countertops are veneer now and other things that you could buy as solid wood are veneer.
You got in when the going was good. I think you can still buy decent enough stuff but having moved a few times myself and then friends and family a lot of the newer stuff is one time use, don’t pick it up, don’t look at it cross eyed, kinda stuff and it shows.
More agreement! Ikea 20 years was twice the material you get today. Products could be taken apart and put back together multiple times. Not so today. Put together once, modify it if you want it to stay like that and if you really have to move it cross your fingers!
I have some 25 year old ikea that’s lasted well. Some was even solid wood and surprising nice( good quality hinges and laminates) But I haven’t gotten anything recent.
But I will say isn’t the last step in the assembly process the 10% probability that you’ll have to do some disassembly to reverse a piece that’s not quite put together correctly?
IKEA sells many products in a couple tiers. E.g. if you get the cheapest billy bookcase it'll just about barely hold up if it's full of books and you don't nudge it. If you get one of the more expensive models it'll be surprisingly sturdy instead.
Same sort of thing applies to nearly all their products. Yes they sell cheap crap -- that still serves its purpose mind you -- but they also sell slightly more upscale furniture that'll actually survive a couple decades.
And it's not like going for a "normal" furniture store is any guarantee either. My previous couch was from a regular furniture store and it broke right in half at around the 5 year mark. Upon inspection one of the cross members was significantly tapered, still had bark on it and everything. On one end it was a solid 2x4, on the other it was barely a 0.2x0.4.
> IKEA sells many products in a couple tiers. E.g. if you get the cheapest billy bookcase it'll just about barely hold up if it's full of books and you don't nudge it.
Agree, but still I just replaced a Billy bookcase that was over 15 years old and moved in 5 different places with me. It was really ugly looking in the end, and due a replacement.
But even Ikea in more recent Billy they replaced metal parts for plastic ones and the "wood" seems even worse.
And even the cheapest crap you can get from IKEA doesn't seem that bad to me. I've had one of those 5-euro LACK coffee tables for around six years and it really only has some minor surface damage on the top. Far away from throwing out.
Although at the same time, I think I'm on my third MARKUS chair because of the gas spring leaking. Thankfully they do have long warranties, so you can exchange them if it doesn't last for 10 years.
Repair skills in the west have all but disappeared
I was able to fix quite a few items of furniture and electronics recently, but if you add cost of parts and labour of a professional, it’s just cheaper to replace
It depends how well you treat it. Someone fidgety putting their feet on a €5 Lack table is enough to ruin it, as the connection between the legs and the tabletop is just double-ended screws.
This is hilarious, but I can't imagine relying on 4 screws into the cheapest wood known to man, all at the one end, holding up a heavier rackmount server without it sagging dangerously. On the other hand, I can imagine two LACKs stacked, with the servers on top of the bottom table, their weight being borne by all 4 legs evenly, and just mounted to the legs of the top table just to hold them securely in place. Anyway, thanks for sharing that awesome link!
BILLY bookcases are very sturdy, have you seen problems with them? I do recommend the thinner ones over the wider ones because the wider ones tend to sag in the middle if you have a lot of weight on them.
I used to live in North Carolina, and some of the outlet stores for furniture are insane. Still expensive but compared to what I would get anywhere else for the same price quite good. Hickory in particular with all of those chair statues everywhere.
I have long been thinking about the idea of saving up for a while and doing a big re-furnish trip down to North Carolina with a moving truck.
The was a great company an old colleague of mine started called Interior Define
My wife and I have one of their sofas—it's quite nice, although our lives might've been easier with one of the Burrow-style sofas that are easily disassembled for moves.
I was mentioning in another thread, seeing good furniture made with engineered finger-jointed wood - which looked perfectly nice after finishing and felt super solid. A middle ground probably: not hardwood but very consistent, inexpensive and available by the mile. Probably with a hard finish on it.
I like steel in furniture, especially for larger items like bookshelves - you get the level of rigidity that you can only get from very expensive and massive chunks of hardwood.
When I was in grad school I accidentally wandered into the workshop for Montauk (https://montauksofa.com/collections/sofa/montauk/) with my girlfriend. They were very polite and I took their card. A few years later when I had some money, and my girlfriend was my wife, I still had the card and we bought one. More than twenty years since we still have it and it's just starting to get to where some of the cushions need the down stuffing refreshed. Quality.
How did you accidentally wander into their workshop? That place was in a random industrial zone off the 20 somewhere near Point St Claire.. Also super spooky, how did you know I was talking about them?
I remember we were staying in a hotel Ibis in a cheap part of the city (I was still in grad school), not sure where now we went a few times. The hotels are now Travelodge, I think. We are avid walkers so we went down Rue Sherbrooke and angled toward the water and just stumbled onto it. It was sunny and the craftsmen had the doors open. So we went in just to see.
How did I know? I didn't. But it related to my own story about buying the one really high-quality piece of furniture I own.
I also have a 20+ year old Montauk. I had the cushions replaced a couple of years ago because they don't offer a restuffing service. Not cheap, but should keep me going for another 20 years.
I think the problem I've noticed is - the furniture that is built to last very frequently fails the partner test - "that looks like old fart stuff".
Same sort of issue with cool remote controls. For example, la-z-boy has pretty good controls - remotes have better designs, have lots of adjustments, and motors seem to move faster. And they too fail the partner test - "that looks like old fart stuff"
I kind of like some stressless recliners.
oh, there is one class of furniture that has a lot of control - the massage chairs. Except they seem to be furniture you want to hide from everyone, they fail the "normal human being" test.
maybe I need to know pointers to other furniture/designs?
My cynical ass assumes it's because they know goddamn well no one under 60 years old has $4,000 to spend on a properly made sofa, irrespective of desire or taste. I make six figures and I certainly don't.
My furniture is all cheap particle board shit because I can't afford anything nicer because I'm spending all my money on a mortgage, food, gas, and student loans. I don't think it's a matter so much of nobody wanting to make good quality products so much as all the companies that did do that and priced their products accordingly are running out of customers, because we're all getting strip-mined by the rest of life's expenses going up all the goddamn time. I would love nothing more than a gorgeous, well made sofa that will last me a solid chunk of my remaining life, but where the fuck am I getting the money for it?
It's the boots theory of economics applied to everything. I'll spend $7,000 on sofas before I die and still have a sore ass.
You say it yourself. Why spend $7k on couches over a lifetime when you can spend $4k on one that lasts forever? If you can only scrape together $1k a year for a new piece of garbage, maybe you should sit on milk crates til you can scrape together $4k.
Maybe the fact that no one thinks this way anymore explains why everyone complains their six-figure income is constantly eaten up by replacing cheap shit.
Hear me out: what if we reversed the various societal changes made since the Reagan era so people make enough money to afford the things they need and want like every generation before mine did, instead of just normalizing this notion that you need to eat shit for years on end so you can have the privilege of nice things?
And that would have knock on effects for huge societal issues like climate change. Imagine how much cheap shit wouldn't need to be made if so many people weren't deliberately kept on the edge of poverty so as to foster consumption practices that make stock prices go up?
I'd argue that reversing those changes would require a grass-roots effort to stop consuming so much cheap garbage. If people bought American and demanded high quality products, American manufacturing would benefit.
But also - I think the 1950s-80s were a complete abberation in which working middle class people could afford a better lifestyle every year. Not "every generation before" ours could afford a house and two cars on a factory income with a pension. Really only one generation got that, and it was mostly due to winning a world war that left us the world's only major supplier of everything, able to project military power and gobble up all the cheap oil and raw materials. Previous generations had no such thing. My grandfather grew up without indoor plumbing. He also worked 12 hours a day. He couldn't afford a modest house until his late 30s, which was after the war. Go further back and look at the stock bubbles and robber barons of the 19th Century. The wealth and pay distribution we have now is closer to historical norms than anything in the 1960s was. The major difference is our baseline quality of life is higher in the sense that everyone can afford a cheap couch (if they want one). I have to think economically like my grandparents, not like my parents.
People like my grandparents built this country by saving and sacrificing their comforts. People like my parents, boomers, got an incredibly easy ride. Now their kids expect it to be that easy. But cheap money can't go on forever, and it's cheap money and a two-car suburban family lifestyle that did all the environmental damage of the mid 20th Century that we're still trying to slow down or reverse.
tl;dr saving and buying the better couch is a more effective means of changing the status quo than complaining that everything is harder for our generation.
> People like my grandparents built this country by saving and sacrificing their comforts.
I don't mind saving and sacrificing, that sounds awesome. The problem is that I'm not saving, sacrificing, working hard, etc. for any meaningful purpose, it's exclusively to subsidize some greedy CEOs/oligarchs luxurious lifestyles.
It doesn't matter if the work itself is meaningful, the meaning is the saving/sacrifice. How many people earn without someone else earning off their back? Very few. My grandfather was a door to door salesman, worked in a clothing factory cutting fabric, bartended, bussed tables, worked in kitchens. My grandmother worked at a candy factory.
There's this funny notion now that work needs to be personally fulfilling or important to humanity or else it's not worth it. It's worth it if you can save money, afford a better life, educate your kids.
Getting fixated on the inherent unfairness of the world, where some people who have wealth and things you can't afford, seems to be a frequent cop out. If you want to be a union organizer and do things to change the inequality of the system, great. That doesn't mean that working to improve your own existence is a waste of time.
Focusing on some of the largest man-made social problems that trickles down to all aspects of one's daily life and materially effects the largest number of people world-wide, often hurting them orders of magnitudes more than it's hurting me, is a strange thing to call a "cop out".
There's probably a financial argument here related to the same money invested, but we all know folks aren't investing in the difference - they're buying more and other junk.
>no one under 60 years old has $4,000 to spend on a properly made sofa, irrespective of desire or taste. I make six figures and I certainly don't.
I do and did, but I live alone. I'm guessing you're supporting a family?
of course, cost of living is also a huge factor. A $4000 couch is pretty much $4000 everywhere. But someone in SF vs. the Southwest (both making 6 figures) have very different rent and general life expenses.
Gary Stevenson agrees with your assumption. If you haven't already, you should check out some of his work and recent book on this. TL;dr: your cynical take is correct.
After looking at what had to be every nursing chair in the world we found that the most old-farty looking la-z-boy was better in every regard and easier to clean. Sometimes I just go in the nursery and doze off in it
Disagree; you have to know where to look. Yeah, you go to the Lay-Z-Boy big box, you're gonna get that. We got a recliner from Ethan Allen that doesn't even look like a recliner. But you lean back, and voila... super comfy.
Comes down to materials. A modern leather sofa without all the bulky frills can pass off as modern and still have reclining features.
It's also expensive as all hell. I grabbed a "man-cave" style two seat recliner with middle seat that transforms into a cup holder: that set me back over $4000. Worth it.
Ugh this - my partner hates the sofa that I inherited from my mother, one that she told me she used to play on in the 1940s. It's a beast, with claw and ball feet that have stubbed many a toe, but I am fighting for its survival.
I got my great grandparents's German made sofa set from my mother some years ago (she was downsizing and didn't have room).
Solid hardwood with carvings all over, legs shaped as claws etc.
But frankly it looked horrible in a modern home, and wasn't all that comfortable to sit in.
So I sold it to a carpenter who was renovating an old wooden building in the remote north (Iceland) to have an interior that would fit the year of construction (I believe around the year 1905).
Kind of like the idea that it is now in a much better place.
Partner sounds like a fashion victim. If social media consumption is making one's taste fond of low quality flashy crap I'd say grow some critical thinking skills.
Many furniture stores have a section with old timey stuff, I guess targeted at the 60+ market: ruffles and pleats and doily type shit. You can't expect anyone younger than a mummy to be enthused about buying that stuff new, whether or not it is better quality, and it's probably all the same cheap crap under the ruffles.
And in slightly younger but still old the iconic Laz-y-boy look is associated with boomer dads with more money than taste so I'd be shocked to see anyone not of retirement age excited to buy one new either.
I mean… not really. Quality and style generally are pretty correlated, with higher quality pieces traditionally being more “old school”. And that was basically GP comment’s point.
One can value form over function, especially if there’s a specific style that the rest of your house uses. If your entire house is decorated in a contemporary style, then a traditional sofa is just going to stand out like a sore thumb.
This whole thread is about overpriced crap that sells because people don't know better. And if one's partner prefer flashy crap to quality stuff by calling quality stuff "antiquated" because it doesn't conform to styles peddled in social media and are devoid of fundamental quality well... that's not a conflict of taste, that is a story about choosing flashy crap for the sake of flashiness. Which doesn't seem defensible to me.
I already said “One can value form over function”. Each person has different needs and wants out of their furniture. Just because you don’t value form doesn’t mean it’s some unbelievable or “indefensible” concept.
I don’t want my house to look like it came out of the 1920s. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
If you think otherwise, then more power to you, but don’t hoist your beliefs and preconceptions on others.
You're playing off a false dichotomy. Furniture doesn't have to look bad to be of quality.
GP said
> I think the problem I've noticed is - the furniture that is built to last very frequently fails the partner test - "that looks like old fart stuff".
This is a problem of taste alignment, not of preference. A person having a taste for the generally poor quality well marketed bit of goods available.
So, like I said. If one develops a taste for a certain type of trendy furniture that is poorly made, it's a personal limitation.
I very clearly articulated the general correlation already and never claimed it is a dichotomy. That is entirely on you.
Just because you don’t agree with someone’s preferences does not mean they’re wrong. I hope one day you’re able to understand that, because you clearly don’t.
You're right. This is pointless because we're talking past each other.
I say it's wrong to buy expensive crap because it's flashy and well marketed, and equally wrong to dismiss things that don't fit the aesthetics peddled under this model. It's wasteful consumerism, one of the most wrong things with society right now. It's killing the planet. In a word, indefensible. There absolutely are fashionable, beautiful, durable options.
You say I am a bad person for having this opinion. "Hoisting" my opinion on others. You used underhanded tactics like false dichotomies. "I don't want my house to look like it came from 1920". Than, caught on a fallacy, you resorted to ad hominem, pretended to have a high moral ground and rode into the sunset in your high horse.
It was some how relevant. I had a similar job making sofas in similar price range. We also had a crazy person stuffing everything. I asked why his job was not in the normal task roulation. They said for that job you have to be insanely strong, have insane endurance and you have to be insane. The guy tried it one time. How hard could it be? After 3 hours he literally couldnt lift his arms.
This. We paid $10k for two sofas. Leather-covered, solid quality. That was more than 20 years ago. They look a bit weathered now, from kids and pets, but they are holding up fine.
Pay for quality. It saves you money in the long run.
> Pay for quality. It saves you money in the long run.
Unlikely. Our sofa is like $300. Let's say it only lasts 3 years before it shows wear or we get bored of it and get another $300 one... your $5k sofa would have to last for 50 years to 'save money'. Not to mention the opportunity cost of those funds.
Pay for quality if you want quality, not in an attempt to save money.
Been putting off commenting for over 24 hours and this is still on the front page! I can confirm there are quality furniture makers here in the USA, though they can be hard to find.
A decade ago, I shopped for the first time at the most famous furniture store in this part of Texas: Gallery Furniture. Growing up anywhere within an hour or two of Houston in the 80s, Mattress Mack was more recognizable to a kid like me than any news anchor or any other television personality. Before the 80s was over, I'd probably seen him hop in the air hundreds of times with a fistful of dollars, talking about how Gallery Furniture will save you money, and he's still going strong today. He even toured big city and small town schools warning kids about drugs. Anyway, I had gotten by for years on hand-me-downs and IKEA furniture, but it was time to replace something ratty, and I walked in there with a vague impression that it might be more pricey than other stores. They told me it was all made in America (some places up north like Indiana?) and when I was asking about cheaper sofas that a guy over 6 feet tall could comfortably nap on, they pointed me to one they said was made locally in the Houston area. It was very long and had a very simple design and had firm foam that wouldn't sag (something I had asked for), and they let me have it for $500, and it felt like much better quality than a lot of the prettier stuff in other furniture stores.
A couple years later when I got married, we were looking for a nicer sofa, and I figured out that the local furniture maker that Gallery Furniture had been selling was called Living Designs Furniture and had a factory in the East End:
Their factory's showroom was very bare, but it was full of pieces, including a colorful chair in the shape of a stiletto shoe! We found an elegantly shaped light gray sofa long enough for me to sleep on, and again with high quality foam, and they built one with some slight customizations we wanted for $1,081 total. Unreal, because we have a white sofa from IKEA that isn't much less, but the quality is on another level!
I'd really like to see a resurgence of products like this in the USA. I've heard of some custom sofas costing several thousand, but somehow this local company is managing to sell at a lower price point. 18 years ago, a buddy of mine was living in Charleston, South Carolina. He had talked to a local high end furniture maker about doing a 3-year apprenticeship to learn how to make fine furniture, but in the end he knew he'd make very little per year in wages (he estimated $35,000 or so). Instead he pursued another dream and went to Napa Valley for a one-year course at the only open-wheel racing mechanic school in the country and ended up working on an Indy Car team for a dozen years. Hopefully more guys like him can find the furniture maker route feasible in the future if American consumers can escape the throwaway mindset. The average household doesn't need expensive Amish Craftsman offerings. A lot of people could afford this local furniture maker we have available, but I understand it could be a risky business venture to try to compete with the stuff shipped over the ocean.
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 a few more pictures, but I was tired by this point). Just shocking how terrible the construction is.
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 materials + pretty design does not necessarily result in a good product.
This wasn’t (as far as I can tell) cheap finger jointed knotty wood. It was some furniture maker who thought “well, this part needs the grain one way and this other part needs the grain the other way, and I have a finger jointing machine, so I’ll finger joint it!” Even if they somehow found a shop that stocked sheets of finger jointed wood with a 90 degree grain rotation across the joint, it would have been an incredibly inefficient way to produce the part in question.
But they didn’t think very hard — see my other comment. I don’t think a single solid piece of hardwood would have performed a whole lot better. Either metal reinforcement or plywood or much more carefully considered joinery was needed.
The glue will probably be the strongest part of it, but finger-jointed hardwood isn't that terrible. Any decent wood glue is crazy strong.
The problem with knots is that they resist drilling and screwing. The problem with new growth is that the pith is the weakest part of the wood, and new growth has the most pith.
Still, it's not a weak and terrible pos wood-like material like 1990's MDF, it will probably be ok for most uses as long as the grain direction is respected in regards to shear direction (typically you want the grain direction to run perpendicular to the shear forces) and everything is properly braced.
The piece in question involved one of the starting wood sections being finger jointed with the grain running along the joint line. It failed where the bases of the fingers were tangent to the grain, which seemed pretty predictable to me just looking at the wood.
Reminds me previous sets of dinner chairs my parents had. Glued together. Slowly dried and then they were less than ideal... Even if the materials are good it means nothing if techniques are wrong.
The chairs had four legs, each of which radiated out horizontally from a central point (they were swivel chairs) then turned downward to the floor. The legs were about 1/2” wide, maybe a bit more. They were maybe 1” tall (vertically in the horizontal section and horizontally in the vertical section).
So the grain needed to run horizontally in the horizontal part to support the bending load. It was probably best for the grain to be vertical in the vertical part, although that was maybe less critical: that section was mostly in compression. It probably also looked better that way.
In any case, the actual construction put a finger joint in the horizontal section just past the turn, so a tiny bit of vertical grain wood extended horizontally over the turn. And several of the legs cracked just along the side of the finger joint, and one failed completely after about a month of gentle use.
The design plausibly could have worked if the joint went diagonally through the turn or was below it. But plywood is strong along both in-plane axes, and the legs could likely have been cut in single pieces from sheets of plywood with strength to spare.
Attractive plywood, even from hardwood species, is readily available. The plies are visible along the cut edge, but this is actually a style people like, especially in Scandinavian furniture. Even IKEA sells some nice chairs with plywood elements, at entirely reasonably price points.
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.
I don't think that amluto is saying that the hardwood itself is inappropriate, or is necessarily ever inappropriate. I think they are saying that the specific joinery in their example was form over function, to the point where the joint was a critical point of failure.
Having done a bit of woodworking as a hobby, I would say that hardwood could be inappropriate if it is used for an element that is purely structural, internal (and thus will be hidden by external features) and there are cheaper alternatives that are just as good, or stronger materials available and we are talking about a critical structural element.
That's a pretty abstract answer but it's always going to depend on the specific project. Sometimes a piece of furniture has no hidden internal structure, or the appeal of the furniture is that it is all bare wood and you want it made entirely out of a beautiful "furniture grade" hardwood. For certain upholstered furniture, such as many sofas, using expensive materials for inner framing could not only be superfluous and add unnecessary cost to the piece, but in certain circumstances there may be better materials available even if you could make a perfectly adequate structural support that will last a lifetime using expensive hardwood and the right joinery for critical stress points.
I read amulto's point as being "expensive material and fancy joinery doesn't matter if you have a weak design."
I recently visited Hong Kong. In a mall I spotted a shop called Sinéquanone (sic). It was flogging "French fashion", quite pricy "French fashion". Who knows, it might be French inspired. You can tell its authentic French thanks to the e acute and the trailing e!
Sine qua non is Latin.
To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder. Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever! Who could forget the Rolls Royce Silver Mist? Mist in German means dung, manure or shit. Someone thankfully noticed before it was released (Frankfurt motor show) and it became the Silver Shadow. Then there was "Consignia" ...
> Mind you that's not the daftest brand name or trademark ever!
Here in France, the daftest I've seen is the Audi e-tron, with etron meaning turd... Though it's been out of common use, so Audi just left the name as is.
> To be fair, the quality did look pretty decent but marketing needs to try harder.
When I lived in Hong Kong, I once saw a boutique grocery store that had a wooden hanging-sign/plaque, and IIRC it was 1997 and the sign said "Since 1996."
Far more amusing were the businesses non-ironically translated as things like "1000 Golden Fortune"-something-or-other.
"1000 Golden Fortune" or Jolly good luck ... something. I think that's fair enough - translation of idioms is very hard when the languages are so far apart.
There's quite a lot of history involved too so that I suspect there are routine translations between the various Chinese languages eg Cantonese and Mandarin to English which might be a bit behind the times but they still work despite sounding a bit twee nowadays to the relevant ears.
Well that's me shot out of the water! It looks like someone bought a brand name and got it a bit wrong, through lack of understanding but who cares when the cash is running in and its not harming anyone.
Sadly this rings too true, rather closer to home. I own a smart new EV - an MG4. MG is a long standing British Marque. I know my car is largely Chinese.
I went to school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK which is where the Morris Garage originated. My dad drove an MG Midgit in the '60s. My mum owned a Morris 1000 (Moggie). My granddad (Morris Oxford) ... well you get the idea.
In the end you have to decide for yourself exactly what you get when you buy a brand or even what a brand means in the first place.
I quite like my car but I do "firewall" it somewhat - I'm an IT consultant by trade.
Yeah. Even at the time we knew West Elm wasn't high end, but we were at least expecting decent.
We know more now (and could afford better) whenever we have to finally replace this, but $2000 is a not-insignificant investment that shouldn't be a complete piece of crap.
My problem is that I don’t even know where to buy _good_ stuff. I don’t want to pay $5k for a couch, but maybe I will _once_ in N years, for some large N, if I know it’s very well made and I like the design.
But I have no idea where to go for this. The overlap between junk and luxury is too large nowadays.
As with so many goods these days, I find that buying stuff made at least a couple of decades ago works best. It's much easier to tell the garbage from the treasure if you aren't buying stuff made recently.
Aggregated reddit searches are amazing. Leads you to the gold mine that is american leather etc, which are often rebranded to more well known brands on a model by model basis. Lots of insiders on reddit with that info too.
Maybey cynicism broke me but I find it impossible to trust recommendations from Reddit. It's too easy for these companies to pay for astroturfing these days.
I've noticed a very prevalent "hail corporate" subculture on reddit that put me off believing anything anyone said.
It's often not, because today's company is not the same as it was 10-20 years ago. The longer you want something to last, the less reliable past experience becomes.
I’ve had a consistently good experience with room and board so far and I am very anal about construction quality (as perceived by myself, anyway, I’m not a furniture expert).
West Elm's quality has definitely dropped the last 10 years. It's still not a bad place to get things like side tables, but I definitely wouldn't buy any furniture there any more, which is too bad. We had gotten a couple of nice pieces there in the past, although they're now gone.
For quality modern furniture, the only game in town around me is Room & Board. The last couch we bought there was ~$6k[0]. It's a lot, but we'd honestly been eyeing it for almost 20 years and it'll likely be something we have for another 20 years or more.
the one that gets me (not furniture, but consumer good) is Yeti.
they seem to be slightly better made, but for SO MUCH more money. They have huge stores devoted to their products. Are people really spending money, and that much, on coolers?
We have a couple of Yeti coolers. They work really well, but they're heavy and have significantly less space inside than you'd expect by looking at them. Most importantly though, they look cool and have nice shiny and colorful exteriors.
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 their leftover product to protect some secret of Dr Who purses that are bigger or magically organized on the inside, but because the entire value of the brand is "I can afford this and you cannot"
Luxury has ALWAYS been about signalling and displaying status and power. It's always about rubbing the prole's faces in their supposed supremacy. Remember, they have money because they are better than you, definitely not because there are systems and structures in place that make it easier to get rich for the already wealthy and connected.
Unfortunately it seems so many people really struggle to understand that while quality often costs a lot, costing a lot does not imply quality in any way. If you can afford to spend oodles on marketing for your product, you probably aren't spending as much on quality as people assume you would.
>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.
Not sure why Coach was chosen for this example - I don't believe they are expensive; last I checked they were in the range of $200-500, which doesn't seem egregious as the actual luxury brands (ex. Hermes, where the entry level bags are $4,000).
That said, I feel there is a real difference in quality at various price points, and focusing on the material ("magic leather") is wrong. When I'm paying a premium I'm usually looking for in the dimensions of construction, and usually that means paying an actual professional who may charge $100/hr, vs 19 year old in Bangladesh. The two might be using the same material but the price difference comes from the person assembling the item.
The problem is you have a ton of companies (even "luxury" ones), that in an attempt to juice their stock price, have also focused on getting costs super low and are now using the same factories as junk brands but just slapping their logo on it. Even products of the same brand can vary wildly in quality depending even on the year it was made.
I have jackets from "luxury" brands that I bought 10 years ago that still look brand new for thousands of dollars (and probably saved money in the long run), but buying a similar item new or even trying to replace it is impossible.
Some brands like Hermes, Rolex, etc. also require you to establish a “relationship” with them to acquire their most popular items (Birkin or Kelly bags, stainless steel watches). This entails a lengthy purchase history, and some schmoozing of your assigned sales associate doesn’t hurt either. Unless you’re some well known figure, just waltzing into a boutique with a suitcase full of cash won’t get you what you want to buy on your first visit.
Other brands are catching on. I hear Porsche (or at least some dealerships) have started gatekeeping 911s this way.
…on the straight away of lap one. The top trim model 3 performance best time around the green hell is like 9 minutes. There are factory Porsches that will do it in under 7.
This is a very ironic comment to have made in a thread about how cheap things aren’t as good as they seem once you look a bit deeper.
Even their models that share platforms with “lesser” brands in the corporate stable go through a lot to differentiate them.
But if you don’t care about cars or enjoy driving, then all of it is a moot point and probably meaningless to you, and you might as well enjoy a Toyota Camry and call it a day.
Depends on where you drive, dude. I spend more time on mountain roads than highways.
And, also, if you like driving, and sometimes drive for fun, curves are way more fun than freeways. None of this has anything to do with supercars, either. My boring mom-car has more than enough power to merge safely. It's (surprisingly, to most people) faster (acceleration and top-speed) and (impressively - ICE tech advanced so much) more fuel-efficient than my almost thirty year old Miata. But, obviously, I enjoy the latter 1000x more than the former.
I guess this makes me a car geek. <shrug> That's fine. I do enjoy driving my super-basic, entry-level sportscar. I have less than zero interest in supercars.
Mercedes and other manufacturers do this as well. While it's arguably an extreme example, you can't purchase the Mercedes Benz Project One hypercar unless you have a history of purchasing their low-volume, extremely expensive cars (AMG Black Series, etc).
Coach is probably a bad example here because they are known for using high quality leather, and they are also among the less expensive "designer" brands (there are Coach leather purses in the $200-500 range, wheras you are looking at $2000-5000 for a brand like Louis Vuitton - also high quality leather, but not worlds apart from Coach). There is a huge amount of variability in quality of leather, from top grain to full grain to split grain, to "genuine" and "bonded."
In general though I agree with your point that it's possible to get the same quality as a luxury brand for cheaper, and luxury brands are about signalling, but it's a continuum. There are also plenty of "luxury" bag brands in the $200-500 range that use crummy leather and you'd be way better off with Coach (or a local artisan like you mentioned.)
> 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.
Some years ago I found a leatherworker, who sells simple handbags/clutches starting at about 300 EUR. He also sells wallets and belts. He has a limited selection of styles, but they are made-to-order thus you can select the colors when you place your order.
He isn't local to me, but I've met him and watched him stitch his bags together and chatted about his style (minimalist, sleek). I couldn't afford anything from him at the time (his smaller items were sold out), but kept his card handy. I'll provide a link, in case anyone is interested.
I've just looked at his web site. Beautiful understated pieces and very good prices for the materials and the amount of work. Some of the handbags are under 150 EUR.
https://saddlebackleather.com/everyday-purse/ is a bit over $200, and doesn't hide that it's made in Mexico (though they do use machines and tooling to process the leather so perhaps it's not "hand made").
I’ve got one of their backpacks. It’s very nice. Heavy, though, at around five pounds. Sadly it almost never gets any use, because I rarely have need for a backpack. I should have bought some luggage instead.
Like the other poster, I also have a couple of their wallets. They’re simple but obviously high quality. They don’t feel as slick as the Coach wallet I was given as a gift, but I have no doubt they will hold up longer.
Leather is actually not a great material for a backpack or an outdoor (non-dressy) shoulder bag from a practical perspective in the 21st century. Nylon and related synthetics is a lot more practical. If you gave me a leather outdoor bag I'd probably thank you nicely and stick it in a closet or sell it.
I do like leather wallets though I almost exclusively use small front pocket ones these days because of sciatica and minimal needs for carrying either cash or a lot of cards.
The front pocket bifold I carry has room for several hundred dollars in cash, and at least 8 credit card sized objects (and could easily hold 2 or 3x that if you didn't mind stacking the less frequently used ones, not counting my ID. How much are these people carrying?
People also probably used to be more fashion-conscious with having even relatively bulky bifold wallets in their front pockets. I carry basically a business card holder with significantly less on a day-to-day basis. Maybe $40 and likely about half a dozen credit card sized object things.
I carry a travel folder when I travel but my actual wallet is pretty minimalist. (Though just a phone wallet/pocket doesn't work for me. The Apple magnetic wallet I bought which I was also uncomfortable with depending on was 3 cards--no more, no less.
I don't have a purse. (Well, I have something from Mountainsmith I've had for decades that a friend calls a man purse. I'm sure it's been in dozens of countries.) But I have a front-pocket wallet/business card holder from Saddlebackleather that wasn't particularly expensive and will probably last as long as I need it to unless I lose it.
I can second SaddlebackLeather. Have a few items from them and the care taken with the design, in addition to the materials used, tells me these items will last a long time.
This is why I differentiate between "quality" and "luxury". Luxury goods are very often just expensive junk that people buy in order to signal that they have money.
Quality goods are well-designed, well-made, etc. And you can't be sure about quality based on price.
Quality is not necessary for a good to be a luxury good. Only for demand to go up disproportionately with increases in income. Practically this means luxury goods are purchased to convey status. Consider Range Rover or Jaguar, which are known for being low quality but luxury brands.
Premium is the word that means paying extra for an increase in quality. Consider a Toyota vs a Kia.
These things are often correlated but don’t have to be.
I don’t know what to tell you for you to believe me but premium relating to quality and luxury relating to status are literally the way they’re defined in the retail goods and brand world.
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.
At least with most IKEA products you assemble them yourself, so the level of quality is immediately apparent, and the pricing reflects it. I appreciate that straightforward approach.
Most everything I've bought there has outlasted my desire to keep using it. There are the occasional problems, like a blue table where the veneer shows a bright white mark wherever it gets nicked, but I feel like many criticisms are unfounded and often come across as elitist.
West elm has been pretty bad for most stuff for us too. Surprisingly we have an okay Urban couch from them that's held up well the last 5 years. The cushions haven't maintained their shape all that much and the feathers occasionally poke through which are my only complaints. Our little kids used to jump on it before we moved it downstairs so the frame was at least built well and it's still pretty comfortable.
Id never buy one again from them though after having everything else fail on us.
About 3 years ago after moving into a new house, I needed a new couch and wanted something that would wear reasonably well without getting into the higher end ($3k+). I found one on Apt2B which they were touting was built around an robotically-welded steel frame, lending to consistent durability. After reading many sofa reviews mentioning buckling particleboard, that sounded pretty good. There weren’t a ton of options due to pandemic shortages so I went for it, which cost me $1500.
It’s held up well so far. Cushions are showing some wear but nothing out of the ordinary, and the steel frame is indeed solid. It might even be worth reulphostering at some point down the road.
I don't live in the Bay Area anymore, but once great thing about living there was the amount of secondhand West Elm / Williams Sonoma furniture for reasonable prices that you could buy from rich people. Most of their quality is a crapshoot but at the right price you can find good deals for some of their items.
Hmm I don't know if coming in from the bottom will get me the access I need, I'm afraid. I've got some bowing across the middle of the backrest. But, maybe I'll give it a go anyway! Thanks.
Eesh... I have a West Elm couch I got at an outlet for half off, so only $1200. It's fairly comfy and looks good, but I feel the back cushions will need to be restuffed sooner rather than later. I've had it less than a year.
I would expect the seller to fix that. Furniture at that price should last much longer. Don't you have any concept of 'merchantable quality' in the US?
When I moved to an area for work I wasn’t planning to live long-term I ended up buying the cheapest sofa in the store. I think it was around $270. After a prolonged illness I grew more and more displeased with it, to the point that I went and bought a better one after I was better. I bought from a place that advertised the inside of the sofa more than the outside. It was all about the build quality and how long it would last. Ended up coming out to around $3k if I remember correctly, but it has a lifetime warranty on everything but the cushions, and even the cushions after 6-7 years of daily use are just now only starting to get to the point of feeling like they are beginning to break in.
Quality can still be found, it just can’t be assumed. I think that’s the case for far too many things these days.
I've been wanting to buy nice furniture for a very long time... unfortunately the housing crisis has prevented my from ever having a sense of permanence. If I had known I'd live in my last place for nearly a decade I would have purchased nice things, but as it stands, until I have a mortgage of my own, I refuse to spend good money on something I may need to replace next year.
The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.
AirBnb should also be banned. And the people who profited off that startup, who must've known they were creating illegal hotels and destroying rental markets, should be hit with devastating fines, maybe also imprisoned.
Airbnb was never meant to be what it has become. It started out as an easy way for people to rent out a spare room. The name “Airbnb” came from air mattresses on the floor.
It’s the get-rich-quick types who decided to be professional Airbnb landlords. Short term leases make no sense at all to anyone actual invested in rental properties, without something like Airbnb to back it. A long term tenant who pays on time should be the dream of every landlord, but with all the Airbnbs, it’s not even considered.
I don’t know if this is the fault of the early investors, but I’m all for pulling the rug out from under the the people who own dozens of properties for the sole purpose of doing Airbnb. They are likely extremely leveraged, due to the low interest rates from years past, so they’d be screwed and be forced to sell fast.
I agree on the international investors as well. Priority should always go to people who will actual live in a place. All those multi-million dollar places in NYC that sit vacant are a horrible. What’s the point of housing if no one is there to live in it.
> starting with institutional and overseas investors.
This would do next to nothing. The landlords buying up real estate are mom-and-pops with fewer than 10 properties. Which makes sense, because residential property is a pretty decent passive income that's only accessible to people with wealth but are not a good asset for large institutions.
Otherwise banks wouldn't sell foreclosed homes at a discount, they'd hold onto them if it was more profitable.
You might want to read into data like this (1) to get a better view of how much housing stock those companies own as a proportion of the total market (it's very little). The data is kind of hard to get, because many small landlords have incorporated as LLCs/LLPs and they make up the bulk of "corporate" ownership.
But it's pretty clear that the big time owners like institutional investors/REITs/etc own less than 2% of all units.
I really don't expect that appointing a committee to decide if your use of a space is acceptable is going to improve the problems caused in large part by having a committee decide how space should be used.
>The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.
What's the issue with them buying houses as investments, as long as they're being rented out? If that's the case, their net effect on the housing supply is zero.
>maybe also imprisoned.
I find it extremely disturbing that people are effectively demanding for bill of attainders for jail sentences for what are basically zoning violations.
Sounds like the actual problem is that landlords can engage in "greedy rent seeking behavior" at all. Allowing people to opt out, but only if they can afford a 6 figure downpayment and keep 7 figure amounts of their wealth parked in a single non-productive asset that's highly correlated with their job prospects is an imperfect solution to say the least. Everyone deserve protections from "greedy rent seeking behavior", not just the people who are in a position to buy.
Good lord man what first time homebuyer is putting down $100k down payments? I just bought a nice house in a well established in demand neighborhood and my total cost down was less than $30k. No assistance program, no special deal, definitely not a cheap house oof this market.
Was your <$30K down a <20% down payment and are you paying PMI as a result? I totally understand that %20 down is a big pile of money to conjure up, but PMI wouldn't have been cheap for us had we been unable to conjure it.
Our cost to close was under $100k with a 20% down payment, but still substantial. And yes, we were first time homebuyers. Obviously we did not buy anything approaching 2M.
With closing costs of $10k-15k, 100k doesn't even break a half million at 20% down. That's (sadly) not even table stakes in e.g. most parts of Boston.
We were ready to drop 20% on the house because like you I was also scared of PMI but when we ran the numbers with the bank the cost was small enough that it didn't make one iota of difference in the long run so we paid 5% down and have a very flush emergency fund.
Someone with good credit and currently renting would be nuts to "wait and save" for even 1 year because the total cost of PMI was like 6mo of our rent and accounting for paying it off over time with inflation it's probably even less than that in real dollars.
Maybe we got lucky with PMI but googling a bit it doesn't seem that out of line with the calculators.
This is quite common trope here among young generation, feeling left out of property ownership like its some basic human right guaranteed by UN charter. Like previous generations were not left out of same/other stuff as well. That the post you respond to is not flagged tells you quite something... Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.
There are whole highly developed countries (higher than US for example in terms of personal freedom, ie Switzerland) who simply don't have home ownership as something usual and folks focus on actual quality aspects of living. Populations are consistently among the happiest (and healthiest) in the world.
Correlation != causation but maybe not joining property rat race (which was always the case, just tools were few and apart for most) has some significant benefits. And if its just about safe investing then we moved topic completely elsewhere, back to good ol' universal greed.
Countries where middle class people rent have pretty "communist" tenant protection regimes. Being perpetually 30 days from a potential eviction is not a position most people can or should be okay with.
Feels a bit pointless to explain basics but I'll bite for the others - I dont know which country is like that, definitely not Switzerland, not Germany, France, Czech republic nor Slovakia (listing personal multiyear experiences).
Neither of them has any (significant) rent control, definitely abolute 0 for young and able, and people have rental agreements which run easily decade(s).
Ie in France its the opposite - owners are properly scared of long term rentals, since rentees can trivially just stop paying and it will take you 6+ month of courts to have an attempt on evicion. They can trash the place and no real recourse. Not empty threat neither, everybody knows such a case personally. Thus everybody -> airbnbs. Blame the system if you grok the situation, french one is one of the worst in the west.
> Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.
The cost of houses in my area went up $100k less than 2 years after I bought my house. The cost of food where I doubled in less than 20 years. Rent went up $1000.
Sorry that people wanting "affordable housing" is an insult to you. I'm sure when the Neo-Maoists promise to massacre landlords, the masses of rentcells out there are surely going to take your sob story seriously and choose to live in good American style "practically slavery" and choose not to join them. Surely they think your comment comes across as empathetic and understanding, not callous and dismissive.
I’m 40 years old and trying to buy a home in a high COLA city with my partner and our child. We are currently renting. Everything is either absurdly priced or surrounded by people of color and crime.
This realization has convinced me that it’s not a supply problem. I go on Zillow and there’s HUNDREDS of affordable condos and single family homes and 2 flats on offer. I can buy many of them cash. But they are in the ghetto. And ghettos are not some sort of act of god or timey-wimey opopsie-dasie. They are deliberate creations of a society.
Similarly, I look on Zillow at houses in second-tier cities an hour or two drive and everything is reasonable. My partner and I work in person five days a week, and yet millennials and Gen Zers working remotely except for once a month have no legitimate reason to be in high COLA markets except for their love of marg towers.
It’s not a supply problem. It’s an “I’m a racist white person and I’m okay with the carceral industrial complex” problem.
All the crime I see in these areas that frankly makes living in them a threat to my female partner’s survival is due to 60+ years of stupid welfare policy and 50+ years of the War on Drugs removing fathers from homes and incentivizing criminal culture.
Sofas, perhaps especially, are pretty hard to fit for non built-in furniture. I bought a used sofa off my brother. (Ironically, their replacements ended up being terrible because they lasted about a year with their dogs.)
I was also very lucky though. I thought I could configure the sectional in a couple different ways. Turned out I rolled the dice the right way because I couldn't. And only discovered this after many months because I was on crutches at the time and couldn't do anything about the sofa sitting in my garage.
Good furniture holds value especially buying used good furniture. If it doesn’t work out next year you can sell it for about what you paid if you haven’t destroyed it. Hard wood holds up to abuse much better than the particle board stuff too.
In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything <$300 is going to be nothing but fake materials like manufactured woods (if not even just veneer covered cardboard) and horrible cushion/fabric.
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
The problem here is, that expensive doesn't mean quality.
Buying a cheap ikea piece and replacing it in a few years might still be a better choice than overpaying for an expensive piece, that's the same quality as ikea, but with a different tag on it (both 'brand tag' and 'price tag').
The ikea stuff also seems to be perfectly fine. Almost my entire apartment I ikea stuff and I’m yet to have anything fail. With some of the oldest bits being the Malm draws which are about 15 years old now and still perfectly fine.
Sure, if you move them around a lot or leave them in the sun they will degrade, but just using them as normal they seem to last way longer than you’d think.
IKEA is highly variable. I’m writing this while sitting on a leather loveseat that’s more than a decade old and holding up great. I also have a chest of drawers that, despite my best efforts during construction, immediately began to sag.
Their expensive furniture is good mid-range stuff, the cheap stuff is cheap.
Yeah the cheap stuff is on par with up to 10x cheaper stuff on Amazon (you just have to deal with drop shipped branding and dodgy/no instructions), the more expensive stuff has better quality competitors IMO.
Such as Dwell.co.uk, coincidentally, completely unrelated afaict to OP. They make veneer-grade non-flat-pack furniture (and upholstered stuff) at a mid-high Ikea price. Made similar I think, or any number (including local showrooms) of suppliers of either drop shipped or wholesale manufactured oak+paint-grade, it seems quite common/popular. I have a couple of items from cotswoldco.com for example that have absolutely matching (but differently named) pieces available from an unrelated local independent shop, that I might otherwise assume had a small manufacturing operation too.
I realise it's unclear because of the position in the sentence & my lazy phrasing, and doesn't read well, but that was capital-M Made, made.com. As in 'Similar to Made I think, [...]'. (Can't edit it now.)
All my Ikea stuff has been perfectly fine as well.
A photo fell off the wall and put a rather large hole in a Lack coffee table one time. We were pretty amazed that the photo frame won. It was a $25 table. I could buy many for the price of something nice.
Having small kids around, and seeing how they play, learn to use a fork, etc, I feel like we made the right choice buying cheaper. Plus what kid doesn't want to play at the table mom and dad let them sticker bomb?
Well sure, but in many cases, you can go to a "proper" furniture store, buy a piece that is a couple of times more expensive than the one from ikea, and get the same particle board and same shitty connections... especially with stuff where the wood is hidden (eg. sofas).
Also the assembly for ikea stuff is usually perfect.. everything aligns to the last millimeter... which again, I can't say for much more expensive furniture pieces.
IKEA stuff is also relatively easy to "harden" with some extra strategically placed metal brackets from Home Depot. For instance you can make a particle board bookshelf very sturdy by screwing some L-brackets on the back corners. Corner braces screwed under the shelves will likewise keep them from bowing under the weight of books.
It's a few extra dollars and will make the pieces survive a move and just generally feel sturdier. It's not a replacement for "good" furniture but will make the cheap stuff much better.
yeah, add lots of glue and metal L profiles or some nice decorative wood. Good glue alone makes a better attachment than the screws and nails but you do have to glue it before it gets wobbly
I feel like beds are in the same category. There is a sea of choice, but very hard to distinguish which is actually higher quality... or if the price difference has tangible benefits (better sleep, etc.).
When I was shopping for a TV console, I went to a "proper" furniture shop and checked out console in the 150 to 200 euro range. Zero consideration for cable management and doors slammed hard when you closed them. Then I went to IKEA and bought a BESTÅ system that totalled like 130€ or something. Soft-closing doors, cable management holes and the lot. Was very happy with my BESTÅ after seeing what other stores had in a similar price range.
>Also the assembly for ikea stuff is usually perfect.. everything aligns to the last millimeter... which again, I can't say for much more expensive furniture pieces.
Probably because the ikea stuff you bought tend to be particleboard and the "expensive furniture pieces" are solid wood. Solid wood tend to wrap/deform more due to moisture than particleboard, which means even if they're drilled with millimeter precision at the factory they end up not aligning when it reaches your house. From personal experience the solid wood furniture I got ikea were definitely not aligned "to the last millimeter".
> the assembly for ikea stuff is usually perfect.. everything aligns to the last millimeter...
What? How?
I’ve moved a lot in the last 15 years and always defaulting to ikea for convenience. “Fits together well” isn’t what I’d use to describe their furniture.
Yeah, that's the real problem. My wife bought a bunch of furniture a couple of years ago that was billed online as "solid wood." It definitely isn't. We ended up getting one piece for free because the one they originally sent and then the replacement were damaged. I pushed her to get a refund on it all but I think she had spent so much time looking for good stuff that she was just tired of it.
It wasn't cheap. I believe the coffee table was close to $1,000.
This is part of the enshittification of everything.
Not long ago you could be a good brand an rely on it being good. Now most of them are just charging for the brand and not providing higher quality.
I am in the UK, I have also inherited Sri Lankan furniture from my parents and grandparents and I have lived there as well. The decline in quality is the same in both those countries. I guess it is global.
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.
I have bought things online and been burned by the not know the who part. I'm now to the point that if it is anything I will be spending a lot of time on, I'm not buying it unless I can see it in person. One vendor's medium firmness might be another's firm. Other furniture is less critical to me, so I haven't put the in-person only rule for that stuff
In-person seems like it should be a hard requirement for anything a person will sit on. There is no way to tell anything just by looking at a picture.
The sofa I got had one in-store that was cut in half at all levels, so the construction and materials could all be seen. Any company doing that is probably going to be pretty solid, and if not, it should be obvious.
A lot of people these days are into the mode of order online. Certainly there are a ton of podcasts that offer deals on some of the online furniture companies. I don't think I'd personally do it but then my parents probably wouldn't have ordered a lot of stuff online that I do. (But furniture and big electronics appliances are arguably much more of a hassle to return than other things.)
I’m actually much happier ordering appliances online vs furniture- because appliances I can evaluate in multiple ways that don’t need me to sit on it.
Unfortunately some very comfortable furniture turns out to not be long lasting, as I discovered, even when moderately pricey. Steel frame sofas can bend and break under repeated use because the steel is so thin - if you can bend it by hand, it will fail eventually.
Well, yeah, appliances. Even if I order one at my local Lowe's, as I just did, it's not like I'm going to run a bunch of controlled dishwashing tests with it.
Durability of furniture is harder to measure even if you try it out.
And it's not only sofas. People still conflate price with quality, and this is massively exploited.
You can see that from the number of "small brand" insta-entrepreneurs. People will readily shell $80 for the latest trendy item they saw in a sponsored insta-ad, believing they're buying a branded product. In reality, it's the same $20-$30 item sold on TEMU, with a brand name slapped on it.
Me? I haven't bought a couch. I'm on the same couch I grew up on at my parent's house that was bought circa 1978, so essentially, yes. Solid wood frame. Re-stuffed cushions. My couch can be found in those "If you recognize this, you're old" memes. AKA, I'm old
Edit: re-reading almost reads if I'm still at my parent's house couch surfing. I'm not a zillenial. I'm in my place with that furniture from back then.
In the U.S. you can drop ~$5k on a Williams Sonoma et al sectional and get a cheaply made piece of junk. I've been happy with Maiden Home for around the same price. Wirecutter (now NY Times) has a couple good couch-buying articles.
We had an ikea klippan for around 10 years, and had to give it up when moving.
During these 10 years I haven't sat on any sofa, be in office lobbies, hotels, showrooms, friends' home that made me feel like it could be a significant upgrade upon my 400 USD sofa.
Sure that might not be usual, and I actually wouldn't recommend any other Ikea sofa in general (many were crappy when we were choosing ours). But price and marketting ("made in XXXX") is still only one factor in the wether the product will be any good.
A chair is a chair unless you get an actual office chair, but even then everyone copied herman miller already. I’ve sat in five figure chairs and there isn’t any magic there other than its provenance I suppose. So many of the cheap chairs being sold today are actually shameless copies of mid century design chairs that people still pay a ton of money for. You might as well pay literally a hundreth the price and get the same experience going generic eames.
I've purchased two sofas, one for $1200 from a trendy company and I returned it the day after it was delivered. And then one for $3500 from Design Within Reach that is absolutely terrific and built to outlast me. I'm not advertising for that store, I'm just agreeing that quality is still available but it was never inexpensive. Mentally I compare furniture to the quality of stuff my parents and grandparents had, and I remember that the couch my parents bought in the 90s cost $2000 then.
On the other hand I bought the current sofa some 20 years ago for about 600 Euro and it is still performing like day one. Probably a design failure. ;)
This article echoes something I've learned since we moved into a larger house this past summer: don't buy new furniture.†
We bought very nice leather couches a few years back (we have dogs, leather is the only option) and paid dearly for them. And they're great. (We looked carefully at the construction details before buying.)
This summer, we had some rooms we cared a lot about and others we just needed to fill in some blanks in, and we camped Facebook Marketplace looking for stuff. Pretty soon, even the living room was getting stuff we found on Facebook, at comparable levels of quality to our old "new" furniture, and at pennies on the dollar. People are simply always getting rid of good stuff, and there isn't a meaningful secondary market for it; they're just thrilled you're getting it out of their house and getting a couple bucks in the process.
I submit that you would end up with a better-furnished room faster, more easily, and at a fraction of the cost of high-end furniture retailers simply with Facebook Marketplace and TaskRabbit (for near-instant delivery).
† Leastways, not if you live in a major North American metro.
Few years ago I moved to another country and had to get rid of everything I had minus ~25kg.
It's bloody hard to get rid of a lot of stuff. I had a great leather sofa, about 15-20 years old (inherited from my grandparents) still in great condition, but I couldn't get rid of it at any price and none of the charity shops took it because it was missing some fire hazard label (sigh...). Same with almost everything: I sold my 2-year old £1,200 mattress for £50 (and I had to practically beg to guy to take it, because it would have been a complete shame to chuck it). Washing machine, fridge, all the "little stuff" (cutlery, books, DVDs, what-have-you). I ended up putting a lot outside "free stuff" and that got rid of a lot.
Actually the only things I managed to sell was an IKEA sleeping sofa and an IKEA dinner table set.
That said, since then I found that actually finding good stuff isn't always easy.
I've moved countries three times and that's been my experience each time.
What's more, actually selling stuff is often such a time consuming hassle (posting, dealing with replies, scheduling pick ups, dealing with flakes) that in a lot of cases you're better off just paying trash hauling service to just come pick it all up in a single go.
I ended up having to discard a perfectly good desktop computer and a high-end scanner because nobody wanted them, not even for free. It's really frustrating, not because I missed out on making some money, but because of how wasteful it feels.
However, monitors seem to sell immediately every time.
It's actually illegal to sell a used mattress in the US - and there are very legitimate public health reasons for the being the case. You can't really clean one - that's especially true of foam, and they can be riddled with lice, bedbugs, and all kinds of creepy crawlies.
Once upon a time when moving countries people would pay for a shipping container... another unfortunate side effect of everything becoming shit - it's not even worth taking stuff with you.
I found it very freeing when I moved country to leave almost everything behind. It really helps put into perspective what is valuable and what you know you would miss, and to reduce dependence and attachment on possessions. I think it has helped me become generally more minimalist in my life too.
What I find helpful with buying IKEA items second hand, I know the exact measurements and can find more infos online. With other furniture items, it much harder. And their names are distinct so I can just search for it.
I've looked around for some quality used furniture at a decent price, it's very hard to find. Just gave up and bought some stuff on article.com which has been pretty ok bang for the buck for me in the past.
> People are simply always getting rid of good stuff
I suppose there’s an interesting survivorship thing going on here. A poorly-built couch probably won’t even last 10 years. And if it does, somehow, you’ll know as soon as you sit on it if it’s about to turn into dust based on the squeaking and general instability. If it still feels solid and you don’t sink into it so deep that you can’t stand up again there’s a decent chance it’ll last another 10 years.
I would worry about stuff like that if I was buying cloth furniture. I am not worried about it buying high-end leather furniture. It seems about as likely as getting bedbugs from a used car (which also happens! but nobody blinks about buying a used car). You're generally buying from people's houses. Maybe I'd be concerned about grabbing something from an apartment.
Do you have a link to an alternative site with information about bedbug density made since 2018 or so?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that in lieu of additional information this is what I have to work with, so I will need a better source of data before I change my mind.
Just put the sofa in the dryer. But seriously, I wonder if there's some heat treatment possible. surely it should be possible and put the sofa in a giant plastic bag and heat the air inside or something.
Bedbugs die much more easily than that, 45C for 90 minutes will do it. The most expensive extermination method for bed and bugs is to seal up the home similar to the way it's done when using pesticides, except they just blast heat into your home for like 8 hours. Kills the bed bug infestation inside completely, but because there's no residual poisons bedbugs from outside can start a new infestation easily. It works great for homes, not worth doing for apartments.
Put it in a Uhaul box for a day in summer heavy sun. It already hits 160f / 71c routinely in summer in a closed vehicle.
Ive done that when getting old wood furniture from facebook. We bake it for a day or 2 in a closed trailer. If there was anything living on or in it, it isn't after the bake.
And the temp doesnt damage what we do that to in any way.
My father went through a double bed bugs ordeal. The first try didn’t work and he ended up throwing out nearly everything he had to get rid of them. Kids toys for the grandkids, furniture, mattresses, clothing, and basically started over like his house on the inside burned down.
For me it's the other way around: anything I might want that's of reasonable quality will take 1+ months to arrive (usually, it'll have to be constructed to order), where I'm only a couple clicks away from having the new thing the next day buying used.
I want to be clear that I'm not saying everything on Facebook Marketplace is great. Most of it is crap! You still have to be discriminating. But everybody is always unloading high-quality furniture, and, at least for now, Facebook is full of excellent deals.
Learned this 30 years ago. Durable quality goods are generally best bought used, but furniture requires close inspection to avoid pests.
Custom Macy's extra long couch from ~2000 is the best thing ever. You sink into it and it holds up. Bought used-new for $1k when a friend paid $4k but was delivered 2 by mistake.
Everything is bad these days, not just the sofas.
1. The new switches I bought broke before the old ones, which are over 20 years old.
2. LED bulbs last less than incandescent bulbs, even with a 20-year warranty.
3. The new cell phone's screen breaks very easily, it's not like the old Nokia's.
And nowadays something expensive is no longer guaranteed to last.
This is why I value old things so much:
I have an old chair to work with, it's not a good chair, but it's better than anything new. I did a restoration instead of buying a new one because the new one might not last long.
I have a 10 year old car, I'm scared to buy a new one with the bizarre stories
about new 3 cylinder engines breaking (throwaway engines?)
I try to use old things as much as possible. I stopped using an old Android when SSL stopped working. It's not a matter of lack of money, it's a lack of confidence in new things.
The last brand that I gave some value to was Sansumg. My last cell phone... THEY FORGOT to add a piece to fix the flat cable for the on/off button. And twice the on/off button stopped working, and twice I sent it to technical assistance. The third time I opened the phone and repaired the button myself. My two Sansumg TVs break a few days after the warranty ends.
On the electronics front I'd beg to differ. Apple has raised the quality bar on electronics by a mile in the last couple of decades. The gadgetry I remember from the eighties and nineties was very cheaply made with plastics that warped or cracked (or both) and cheap switches made of molded plastic and a ballpen spring. Casette player gears were mostly made of that white plastic that always wore down with not much usage. I went through many "high end" walkmans that did not last more than a couple of years each.
It's all too easy to see the past through rose tinted glasses. Also remember that the "built to last" stuff from the past is often an example of survivorship bias.
Bought a Framework laptop last year to make sure I never get into a situation of having to throw away a whole expensive laptop just because the manufacturer decided I shouldn't be able to replace or upgrade parts easily or cheaply myself.
Of course, there have been many bad things in the past. Floppy disks, cassettes and VHS were horrible technologies.
Did you use tube radios? They broke all the time.
The difference is that they weren't intentionally horrible, they were limitations of an era.
But at some point, devices start to last a long time. My parents' first refrigerator ran without problems for over 10 years.
I've had far fewer problems with CDS and CD players than with cassette players.
And we used to have a lot of low quality items, but now it's much harder to find good quality items. And brand means almost nothing. Even Apple has been selling notebooks with horrible keyboards for years. I'm just using an Apple Notebook now, I've been waiting for years for them to change the keyboard.... The Nitendo Switch Joystick has a drift problem and Nintendo ignores it...
There is no reason for a new Samsung TV to break after a year of use. Or LEDs.
Or power switches.
It's not a technical limitation, it's a choice.
You made me laugh with "refrigerator ran without problems for over 10 years". My family cottage has a still-running refrigerator that's been there for close to 40 years. Third or fourth handle, though ;)
I think when they try to hedonically adjust for inflation - they do a terrible job.
The quality of everything is trash. And if you want something that has the type of quality you used to get 30 years ago - you're going to pay close to 4-10x as much.
Everyone is selling trash for cheap. We live in a mall of garbage.
The worst part of it for me is how I can't really trust anything. Cheap, expensive, brand, generic, it doesn't matter, I can't trust it. I feel like I can only trust stuff I've made myself. If only I had infinite time to learn how to make everything.
The LED bulbs are a particular travesty. At least they are better than how we polluted everything with CF bulbs.
Only buy CRI 95+ (99 if you can find them). Not because of the color rendering quality (although that is a great benefit), but because they will tend to have appropriately derated other parts of the circuit, which are the elements that fail. They can do this for that product because at the more upmarket price, they can afford the additional 0.02 in COGS.
As to Nokia phones, well yeah. I understand there is a real market for them now, since they found they are very effective black box flight recorders.
Nokia phones weren't as durable as you remember. A Nokia phone would hardy last 2 years with limited use, either the battery or power connector would die quickly. iPhones get way more usage than Nokias and they easily last 3 years.
Also I've literally never had a LED bulb die on me.
I don't know what kind of nokia your talking about but I use a 12 year old nokia feature phone, works fine, very robust, had countless drops, onto countless surfaces, often gets smushed when I go rock climbing and forget it's in my pocket. The battery is barely working but I still get 4 or 5 days charge on it.
I will have to upgrade soon to a 4G version because the 3G bands are getting repurposed in the UK over the next few years. Otherwise I would have kept going with it. Thankfully HMD still make the ones that run the S3 OS... which is immediately obvious when they actually bother quoting standby time in the specs; the KaiOS ones are basically just a worse android phone with all the same power drain issues and not enough compute or utility to justify it.
If you mean the original one I wouldn't argue, I had one of those and remember how heavy and chonky they were, and how they would instantly explode whenever dropped... The modern ones aren't like that and I suspect are actually far more robust despite the myths of old, because the density of modern feature phones are generally so low and the electronics are so much smaller with more room for casing that it's very hard for them to damage themselves. That's probably true of all feature phones, but the problem is most of them are painful to use because of terrible software, nokia's S30+ is far from ideal, but it's not absolute crap for basic functionality either.
That said, I wouldn't recommend the new 3310, because it's only 2G which isn't going to give you very good call quality or network coverage globally, better to go with any of the 4G S30+ based phones for longevity. Just avoid KaiOS because it defeats the purpose of a feature phone by trashing battery and giving you smartphone features, and apparently it's like the worst android preloaded dumpster fire you can imagine.
I think there are still quality products out there, but they are rare and expensive and you have to spend forever researching to figure out which products are :/
still are as so many see to be purchased and then running the ground for short term profits
I recently switched from my 5.5 yrs old Xiaomi Mi 8 to Google Pixel 8. The new phone is 20% more expensive (inflation adjusted!) and at almost all metrics a bit worse than the old one. The only thing better is a camera (and I suspect it is because of the software, not the hardware). There are other departments where Pixel is better (CPU, wireless charging, newer OS version, eSIM support), but I don't use it.
>Everything is bad these days, not just the sofas.
When these conversations happens, I always wonder why people want some of these items to last forever.
Are you going to stick with that 10 year old plasma TV? Great. I want new tech, and this stuff moves fast. Furniture is a bit different, but my parents had all kinds of good, long-lasting stuff that no one wants because it's out of style.
Our cheap ikea couch keeps lasting, preventing us from buying a nice, new one. We can't throw it out of it's not broken.
It is long known that companies who sell good quality products go out of business after a couple decades at most, they saturate their market and because no one needs to renew, the company dies.
Ironically ikea HAS to sell quality (for price) because they are such a big brand. Their stuff is great quality for price, so people keep coming back for upgrades, when they can afford it.
I've had my 65" LED Samsung smart TV for almost 10 years now... it cost about $800 back then. I thought about replacing it recently, but decided against it because it's working great and I don't feel like I'd be gaining much to buy a newer TV. Technology hasn't really advanced that much since 2014...
If picture quality matters to you (no judgement, at all, if it doesn’t) then OLED is a non-trivial step up in image quality.
I get it though: for 90% of the stuff I watch, I couldn’t care less about the quality. Much if it is on a small screen or in 1080p.
… but movie night with my wife/kids? Those are the nights I am grateful that the picture quality in my living room is untouchable by a theater. Those are the moments I, personally, live for.
I remember being quite blown away by my first Blu-ray discs (Planet Earth series) on a PS3 connected to a 1080p plasma, well ahead of ubiquitous 4K and HDR. It was the first time source quality really made a difference to me, coming from DVDs and rips.
> I always wonder why people want some of these items to last forever.
My friend had a NEW Ford that went to the workshop more than 10 times in the first year of use. It's about trust that I will turn on the device and it will work.
> I want new tech
Buy it. I met people who sold their old iPhone and bought a new model every year, nothing against that. My problem is if the IPhone in this first year broke two or more times like my Sansumg.
My home theater TV is a Hitachi plasma from 2007. It works exactly as it worked the day I bought it. You know what broke? The bog standard MacMini that acted as my HTPC suddenly lost the ability to output 1080i after a software “upgrade” so now I’m stuck with 720p.[1] so even if one of your tech doesn’t fail, something else in your tech circus can fail, ruining the experience anyway.
The irony here especially with furniture is that if you’re rich enough to buy real quality design pieces you’ll sell them for more than you bought them for when you’re ready to move on
I fully agree that new is very often worse than old.
I've had to return 3 new iPhones in a row for manufacturing defects and out of box software errors. A TV lasts me maybe 4 years before it's 'broken' and needs to be replaced.' Home appliance longevity is laughable now.. (especially Samsung, my gosh.) I've purchased 5 new cars over the past 15 years or so, only one of which didn't have serious problems from new that had to be dealt with.. or could not be resolved/etc. We're just hitting bottom here, the next 10 years are going to be pretty rough.
My experience:
Our last two washer lasted for 20 years each. We have only third one now and first one did not break :)
I have bought many (6) smartphones and non has broken during my usage and also after I passed them to others.
We have 4th TV at home and each one was fully working when we replaced it after ~ 10 years. Current one (Sony), our first LCD is from 2012 and works perfectly (with just new set top box).
I have bought/got many laptops and any of them has broken. I have laptop from 1996 or 1998 which still works. There were software issues there, but they are fixable by update. (I have never bought Acer or Asus though)
You're exaggerating about light-bulbs. There is no way LEDs last less than incandescents. If you are experiencing this, its possible your wiring is bad. You should call an electrician and have them check that out.
There are some very bad, cheap LEDs on the market. Sometimes even under name brands. I've learned to be pretty picky about which ones I buy, both in terms of their longevity as well as the quality of the light.
Yes, when I bought a few LED lights from Aliexpress (years ago), they got broken in a few months. But I have philips LED light since ~2012 and that still works without any problem.
Phillips master ultra efficient, similar to their Dubai lamp, may be what you need. Running much less power per led is more efficient, so there's less heat and the lifetime is massively increased. Big Clive put a good video out about Dubai lamps a few years back.
Same here - I am constantly replacing my LED lights whereas parts of my house still have 25 year old incandescents that have never been replaced since I moved in.
Same here. I keep a big box of LED lights hanging around in a box and am constantly replacing them. I had to replace incandescent lights too, but not nearly as often. Everything is designed to fail.
You are absolutely incorrect. Most of the LED bulbs on the market have incredibly poorly designed power circuits that absolutely cook the passive components.
I hear this a lot, but my fairly inexpensive IKEA sofa is about eight years old with no problems at all so far.
EDIT: Actually, in general I've found that my IKEA furniture has done pretty well (basically everything in the house is IKEA) with the sole exception of a "Lack" coffee table, whose surface is kinda disintegrating after 8 years (I think it's basically made of cardboard with a veneer...). The name should perhaps have been a warning.
For some reason people hate IKEA in the US. Was trying to sell a standing desk I bought there for 750$ and nobody wanted it. Ended up selling it for 150$. I also had a Jarvis and it was gone in an instant, even though the IKEA one was much much better.
I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
IKEA is beloved by many in the US and generally one of the most specifically in-demand brands in the market for used contemporary furniture. You might just be in an unusual region or had some other reasons why your listings didn't perform the way you expected.
That said, I am one of those people who doesn't get a lot from them so I can speak to some of criticism. Part of it is just the aesthetic, and theirs doesn't match how I decorate my own space or what I usually feel good around. That's just the nature of aesthetics, though, and there's always going to be some difference in taste between any two people and any two regions.
As for quality, though, I think the critique you hear reflects the quality of their budget products. If you're eyeing modern or euro designs at a fancy furniture studio and then go to IKEA to find a cheap approximation, you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
That shouldn't rally be a surprise (cheap is cheap for a reason) and doesn't hold true for their mid-range and higher products. And heck, it's not even really fair when Walmart and Target furniture isn't any better, but it's enough to keep feeding the reputation.
> you discover that much of the cheapest stuff has the same flimsy glueboard, peeling laminate, and unstable joinery of the cheap stuff at Wal-mart.
I'm not going to argue too much with this, but I think this is underselling Ikea quite a bit.
Their cheap stuff is definitely made out of cheap materials. But I've found it to be well-engineered compared to walmart with reinforcements in critical places and general overall good quality control (doesn't come pre-scratched).
Walmart-level furniture on the other hand is often designed to look a certain way, with no consideration for how loads will be placed on it or long-term durability.
I feel like the cheapest thing in a certain price category in IKEA is "doesn't survive two moves" stuff, but everything above it is ... basically fine. Like it's a table, there's only so many ways to put 4 metal bars and a piece of wood on top. It'll be fine.
For what it's worth I've had better luck with Walmart furniture than Ikea, but that was because I was careful about the Walmart stuff and just trusted the Ikea would be fine.
If one wants durable from IKEA, shop by material. They have sheet steel and solid wood that will outlast any particle board. The steel is a little thin on the budget line and the wood is not very aesthetic for some tastes, but they usually have options that last or outperforms more expensive particle board furniture that are more complex due to aesthetics. Hell even plastic there is fine, so many cafes with shitty beater IKEA cafe furniture.
The other thing you can do is glue-and-screw instead of just using the screws. I’ve had a bookshelf or two break due to the screws blowing out of the chipboard during a move. Using regular wood glue/PVA meant that that never happened again although it also means you can’t disassemble it. Disassembling is kind of overrated though, the screws don’t ever go in as tight the second time, especially after it’s been sitting loaded with books for a few years.
When replacing screws in soft material, I slowly turn them to the left to feel when they drop into the existing thread rather than making new grooves. And in my experience, IKEA furniture reassembles fine multiple times. You also have to make sure such screws are and remain tight, because if they start getting loose that working back and forth will destroy the threads of the softer material. If a piece of furniture isn't solid, figure out why and shore it up before it gets progressively worse.
Oh, yeah, I discovered this not because I thought staples would be stronger but because I built one shelf first and was tired of trying to nail those stupid brad nails in by hand... so for the next shelf I pulled out the staple gun. Was so impressed with how much more rigid it felt that I went behind the other shelf and drove a bunch of staples through the backing cardboard :)
I think more than a bit of it is typical American trademark laziness and inability to follow directions. I see so many of the bookcases without the backing sheet on them. Even if it's just thin cardboard, it provides a lot more of the structural integrity than you might think. The point is to keep the cubes from deforming and having a progressive failure.
I think IKEA is sort of like the Toyota of furniture. It doesn't look amazing, but it's higher quality than the price would lead you to believe because they work very hard to design things economically.
It’s also engineered incredibly well. There are no weak points or flaws in the design. It feels like someone poured their heart and soul in to producing the absolute strongest and most practical item possible given the budget.
I am. So many other companies products seem to have one weak spot that completely ruins an otherwise strong design. Meanwhile ikea stuff seems perfectly designed for the material budget.
God no, it's awful. At least 50% too small in all dimensions. It's a chair that deliberately ignores that someone larger than 160cm 50kg girl might sit on it.
I mean, it depends what you mean by ‘real quality’; you’re not going to get hand-crafted expertly made stuff that will last for centuries or anything. But for the price, their mid to high end stuff is excellent.
Yeah, I have a couple of Ikea chairs in a room that replaced (cheap) wicker that was falling apart. They haven't been used hard but, to me, they were pretty inexpensive, look good, and are very comfortable.
On the other hand, I bought a dresser with a lot of particle board and, no, it's by no means well made. But it's in a bedroom and it works. I could have spent 4x (or more) for a nicely made hardwood dresser from a good New England brand. But even getting it into the bedroom upstairs might have been a bit of an adventure.
I don't mean anything like artisan or hand-crafted. I mean well-built, out of quality materials. A good quality table, for instance, should last decades.
I think a lot of their solid wood stuff (it’s not all chipboard!) would fit the bill, tbh. You do have to be slightly careful with the assembly (it’s not difficult, but some people like to treat the instructions as suggestions, and then get annoyed when it falls apart…)
I'm writing this comment sitting at a basic IKEA particleboard desk that I've had since 2014. It has survived daily usage for 10 years and 2 moves (one coast-to-coast). The only signs of wear is some scuffed paint where the hands rest in front of the keyboard and veneer is starting to peel slightly in one the corner.
I think the reason for this is simple: Ikea does make some pretty poor-quality furniture, but it's often on the floor right next to some very well-built stuff that will last for many years.
Price is sometimes an indicator (I bought two Ikea dressers ~15 years ago; I kept the cheaper one for only a few years while the more expensive one is still going strong) but not always (my 18-year-old sofa was the entry-level option at the time).
Same here — I have an Ikea bedframe that’s nearly a 2 decades old at this point and has moved four times. An office chair lasted me 7 years. Bookcases over a decade old.
I grew up in a nearly all Ikea household, and it’s only later in life I have discovered their reputation.
$750 for an IKEA desk is crazy money. Does it have hydraulics to raise and lower the desk?
But depreciation on IKEA is huge because while it can last a long time within a household, it moves very poorly so if it has been moved or reassembled once or twice, it’s likely near end of life. But hard to evaluate that, it’s not like it has an odometer — hence value for used it very low.
Ikea's goods usually come in different price ranges with the most expensive often not being 'cheap' but 'cheap given the quality'.
That being said, often their cheapest stuff is the best value for money because it's so cheap that it lasting more than a year would be a miracle (but they usually do!).
Yeah, ikea standing desk prices are crazy. There are plenty of comparable products on Amazon for a lot less money. I kept looking at them in the store thinking that there must be something that could warrant the price, but I just can't see it.
I think a lot of this is attached to a puritan-based work ethic. If something isn't hard to do, or require a lot of time and energy then it's not of high quality or worth having.
Yes, Pax is only sturdy when mounted to a wall. It is very unstable by itself. But isn’t it meant to be permanently installed? I’m expecting to leave my Pax when I’m moving out.
Yeah, I dunno, maybe it’s different stuff in the US? I know at least some of the items are different.
With the exception of the aforementioned table (which I think cost about 8 euro at the time, so, really, what did I expect) I’ve found all their stuff to be of very decent quality, certainly better than what you could get from ‘traditional’ furniture stores at the same price.
In the US alot of peoples first experience with Ikea is buying the cheapest desk, couch, bookcase, etc. for a dorm room or first apartment. And those are largely trash that won't survive a move, spilled water, accidental bump, etc.
They have a line of pine furniture I like, as well as other things that are solid for the price (their kitchen cabinets) but you only have one chance to make a first impression as they say.
It really depends. IKEA runs the entire range of very temporary to actually pretty good. The trick is knowing which is which, although price points are usually a good indicator.
I dislike their engineered wood stuff. It’s decent for furnishing an apartment but for more permanent things real hardwood just feels nicer, and IKEA has relatively few options with that material.
I had an engineered wood bed frame from them split in half, whereas an older IKEA pine (not hardwood but whatever) bed frame still lives on.
You don't have to. Every IKEA store has shortcuts to quickly go to the section you want. And at the start, after the stairs usually, you can go directly to the restaurant and to the small stuff section, if you want to skip the furniture show rooms completely.
> I Often hear people saying that IKEA furnitures don’t travel well or don’t last long. It’s like we’re not going to the same IKEA.
I mean, if you are comparing with heirloom class furniture then that’s certainly true. After taking the cabinet or bed apart and sticking it together 4 or 5 times, you certainly start to notice some degradation. But then we’re talking about a factor 100 price difference.
The thing is, antique stores are stuffed to the gills with heirloom class furniture, and it doesn’t cost 100x the amount. Gorgeous solid cherry, mahogany, etc, where even the backs and drawer bottoms are solid can be had for a song. We recently tried to find a mostly solid wood IKEA dresser, but because they’re switching all their designs to new anti-tip designs over the next few months, almost everything was out of stock. So we decided to look a bit further afield, and we went to our local antique shop. We ended up spending $600 for a totally refinished solid cherry dresser, delivered into our room. It’s stunning, totally solid cherry, and I think slightly less expensive than the IKEA dresser we were trying to get. Not spending 2 hours cranking screws was a really nice bonus.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s necessarily true everywhere. We replaced our IKEA (or equivalent) stuff with solid wood antiques and they were all $1000+. We had only two items to really replace, but compared to the $50 that the IKEA stuff cost it was quite an expense.
Yeah, maybe this place was unusually cheap, but chatting with the owner made it sound like the supply far outstripped the demand, so I don’t think that’s fundamentally true. That said, I’d still take the $1000 solid antique over the $600 mostly solid IKEA piece.
Back in 2012 I furnished a home with Ikea furniture.
Yes I hate them.
You'd spend $60 on a book case and spend the next 4 hours trying to understand what the instructions mean and how to build it. You also needed a partner to hold corners together.
Now today, the furniture instructions are better and instead 16 different weird fastener, there are 8.
Its a frustration thing. Ikea didn't really do anything but be low cost. We blame Ikea like we blame Walmart for having drug addicts.
I think this every time I built something ikea, then I build something from another brand and I discover a new abyss, then I go back to ikea. It's a cycle.
I know these people. They aren’t stupid. Many of them just aren’t good at visualizing things they haven’t done or been shown before.
They may know X should go into Y but the task is so unfamiliar or counter to how they think that they hit their working memory limit before it makes sense to them.
Impatience just makes that worse.
IKEA’s instructions are extremely helpful in this case.
Yeah, I’m not particularly handy (I break out in a cold sweat whenever anything requires more than trivial assembly), but I’ve never had any issue with assembling Ikea stuff.
I love IKEA instructions and construction. I honestly get a buzz from the puzzle. If I have to construct more than one of an item then I'll compete with myself on speed and efficiency.
It's basically Lego for adults (which was more exciting until Lego pushed its market into the adult demographic).
Which is actually part of Ikea's brand identity. When you put it together yourself, you feel closer to the furniture than if someone just plonked it at your house. OTOH, if you hate that kind of thing, you'll never go back, but I guess they have an assembly service these days.
I have an Ikea Lillberg sofa from 2005 that I never dreamed I would hold onto as long as I have.
Every time I've moved, I think this will be the time I replace it, but the joinery has stayed rock-solid, the wood has aged beautifully (though I admit this is likely owing to a lack of pets or children) and even the upholstery has never pilled or visibly worn (though I keep thinking about ordering a replacement slipcover set from Comfort Works, which makes aftermarket upgrades for long-since-discontinued Ikea products). And the minimalist, Danish-influenced style somehow never looks out of place no matter what else I put around it.
This article has me thinking I may yet keep the Lillberg for years to come.
I got an IKEA couch about 9 years ago. It was like... $700? The construction is definitely very cheap and you can tell if you flip it on its back, but it's very comfortable and sturdy enough that it still feels solid in normal use.
I don't think "cheap" construction is necessarily a bad thing, honestly. There's ways to do cheap construction such that it works just fine.
You're quite correct about the Lack. They're cheap as hell (15 bucks at time of writing?), but as a result quite manipulatable, such as creating 3d printer enclosures [0]. You can see some of their insides as they go through the process.
Also… I haven’t priced out Lack tables in a while but it looks like they’re still only $20?! I last bought one in probably 2006 and they were $20CAD at the time.
I still own some Billies made in 1995 or so by Ikea. Literally massive wood and damn good book shelves.
The ones bought by me in 2008 or so very noticeably less well build but still ok.
The ones we bought in 2018 or so are shit, especially the shelves are so thin that they begin to sag.
In 2008 or so a friend of mine bought a "kallax" (another name then) and it was awesome, it's still in his basement and looks good. We bought one in 2023 and it's basically only paint, some "wood" and air. It's ok to store stuff in, but it's impossible to drill a screw into the wood. It's like trying to screw paper.
KALLAX used to be EXPEDIT. Both were made from honeycombed cardboard (mostly air, as you say) covered with very thin sheets of painted MDF. Maybe there was a time EXPEDIT was more solid, but I had one in the 1990s, and it was just like this.
You can drill the thin wood in IKEA furniture like this, but you have to reinforce it.
IKEA has always had a mix of wobbly instacrap and solid stuff. I remember they made a short-lived modular shelf called BRODER [1], which was solid steel and came in wall-mounted or freestanding configurations, the kind of solid thing you want in a garage or storage space. I was shocked at how high-end it was. It was discontinued to cost and low sales.
Honestly those cubes at least the 4x4 are perfectly fine. And cardboard is a hell of a lot more sustainable than solid wood and probably particle board
Kallax redesign thinned out outer walls of previous Expedite by 1cm so it looks closer to the thickness of the shelves and dividers. Also saves on a lot of material I imagine with the volumes involved. Also soften edges to be kid friendly and more scratch resistent finish. Cheaper, looks more aesthetically balanced IMO, and basically as statically strong holding stuff and doing furniture work. But thinner walls makes difficult/wobbly moving in larger 4x4, 5x5 variations.
I had to cinched a band of webbing around the outside of the shelf during move to prevent it from falling apart. Gluing all the dowels/joints/connection also helps with strength a lot, but who has time for that.
Structurally they're fine, and can hold a fair amount of weight. Just treat them well; don't cut/drill into them or let them near water (the cardboard gets soft), don't overload them, and don't move/lift them while they're filled with heavy objects. While they're cheaply made, they're not among IKEA's worst products, I think.
Thanks, that's fascinating. Ar least in my recollection, the expedit I knew was comparable to a Billy in wood density, but I might be mistaken - it's nearly twenty years.
Funnily, the most sturdy piece of furniture we own is from Ikea. Two massive desks build from solid steel frames and a plate made with wood furnishing. Totally indestructible, weighs a ton and was made by Ikea in the 99s or so. Funnily enough, we didn't even know that they where from Ikea. We inherited them from my father in law and were cursing their weight like "man I wish Ikea made this, than it would be easier to carry". After dismantling them for transport we discovered various Ikea stickers. Sadly we don't know the model, just that they where manufactured by Ikea.
The most endurable piece of furniture I know of is the kitchen of my mother in law. Made in the 70s or so it uses resopal finishing and the counters itself looks like new, despite years of heavy use and non stop smoking.
I have a lot to complain about their decline in quality (at least with IVAR they realized they've gone too far and reintroduced metal rails) - but don't diss my boy EXPEDIT/KALLAX. :)
IMO, it's one of their most brilliantly engineered pieces of furniture.
Sure, it's engineered to be cheap - but definitely not cheaply engineered. The whole geometry etc. is designed around what is possible with the materials.
They are really low-priced, versatile, easy to move, and TBH, for veneered cardboard it has no right to still be this sturdy, especially the 2x4 and smaller variants - and as another poster has said, even the large ones, as long as you don't try to move them around with heavy stuff inside. Just be dilligent when assembling and see that the screws are tightened really well.
At some point in my twenties, I decided it was time to upgrade from my broke college student IKEA lifestyle which to me meant West Elm. Every thing I got from West Elm was absolute garbage and none of it lasted more than a handful of years.
Now I'm in the prime of my career and could move up to something actually nice if I really wanted to, like Design Within Reach (truly the most ironic business name in existence). But it's just so hard for me to justify a 5x or more price jump, when, honestly, the IKEA furniture I have has been so good.
I have a decade-old IKEA couch that is still in great shape despite surviving cats, dogs, young children, a snoring spouse who slept on it every night for about a year, and being mostly occupied throughout the entire pandemic. It's a tank, and still looks good to me.
I think I've committed myself to having a style that is basically "IKEA + some vintage stuff" which seems to work well quality wise and is about an order of magnitude cheaper than getting new quality non-IKEA furniture.
After a lot of digging a few years ago, I settled on the IKEA Finnala. So far it's held up pretty well.
It's not as well made as quality pieces, but I worked from the assumption that any couch I bought would be trash. Some of the nice things about a buying into a system like the Finnala are that when an arm, cushion, cover, or whatever fails, I can just replace that piece; there are aftermarket covers and legs; if I move it can be disassembled; and if a new place is smaller, the whole thing doesn't have to be trashed.
I love quality furniture, but it doesn't always fit the bill for a society where people can't afford a single family house or put down roots. (Note: that still doesn't necessarily justify all the items being sold today that are destined for a landfill in a few years.)
I avoided the LACK after seeing someone spill drink and watching it bubble up like paper.
My coffee table is still from IKEA, but it’s metal. I’ve had it for 11 years now. It’s on wheels and some of them look like they’ve seen some stress over the years… and it’s been moved to 8 homes in those 11 years, which could have been the cause. But it still works great and I don’t know the the average person visiting my home would notice that.
I have been thinking of getting something a little larger and more grown up, but I love the functionality of the wheels, how it can get out of the way, and that I don’t have to baby it. It doesn’t look like they sell it anymore, but it was $40 well spent.
Ditto, my kivik has lasted so well that i didnt have the heart to get rid of it. It helps that there are many stores that sell custom covers of all kinds of fabrics.
IKEA has also however gone downhill compared to ~10 years ago, however. A Poang today, compared to 10 years ago: does not have beveled edges on the wood (which makes it look cheaper and feel less 'soft'), and is even slightly narrower, so that the old cushions dont really fit in the new one.
I think we are seing the effect of increasing prices and breakdown of global supply chains there
I've found Ikea furniture is great and lasts a long time as long as you don't move it to another apartment, that seems to really stress the joints and it will get rickety after 2-3 moves.
The article goes on about the quality of manufacturing, which is very fair, but something that bugs me, and it seems to apply to cheap sofas as well as very expensive ones.
Why are so many of them just plain uncomfortable? I'm looking for one I want right now, and I have to go around a furniture shop and try each out and I reckon, maybe 1/4 of them are suitable for a place you might enjoy sitting in.
The high end furniture shops seem to be the worst, i've seen 4 figure sofas that are the most uncomfortable thing I ever tried. Champions of form over function.
My last favourite sofa was around 2500 I guess, lasted 10 years, was excellently comfortable, but was unfortunately the wrong shape for my new place, I have not found anything anywhere near as good as that one.
It may be my height, much furniture seems a little off to me, and it is hard in general for me to find things I'm happy with.
I think this speaks to an important factor which is that most of us have little awareness of our posture and typical sofa designs reflect this. We want sofas to 'collapse' on rather than to sit comfortably. I became aware of this from learning the Alexander Technique to deal with another issue.
One hack you can perform on most sofas is to add some height to the rear legs using castors or wooden blocks or something. This tilts it forward a bit. Sitting back or reclining is fine in a dentist's chair because there's head support but it's no good on a sofa! There our head and spines need to be balanced.
Anyhow -- quality of materials and design are both important but the fact is that average bodily awareness is poor and this is a fundamental reason why our furniture is worse than it needs to be!
The plush sofa you sink deep into for TV at the end of the day has a different function than the firm sofa your dinner guests sit on the front of while sipping cocktails, etc
Many of the sofas you were looking at were probably designed for a different function than you were seeking.
I just spent about $700 having new cushions made for a 50+ year old Danish Teak sofa that I inherited from my grandparents. The original cushions were long gone, but the wooden frame was still in great condition.
I sourced high-quality foam and wool upholstery fabric from Maharam and took those to one of the best upholsterers/furniture restorers in Los Angeles. They did a wonderful job and now I have a super-comfortable couch with many good childhood memories, that should last me another 25 years before I need to replace the cushions again.
Point being, get a classic old piece and restore it. It will last a lifetime.
Is it super heavy? I've noticed weight often equals how long something will last in good condition, and old furniture is often way heavier and bulkier.
>Same goes for old wooden windows etc. that can last a hundred years or more if properly taken care of.
The key may be the "properly taken care of" part (or they didn't buy crap at the time part).
I live in a greater than 200 year old house and all the older windows dating to whenever are complete crap compared to newer Andersens I've had installed.
Survivorship bias. The cheap stuff doesn't last. "Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet..." - Wallace Stevens, 1922. "Deal" being cheap pine or other soft heartwood (in the poem he is trying to evoke a scene of poverty and maybe a bit of gaudiness). Not that buying old can't be an excellent strategy, it having survived either a long life, or perhaps it was just never used in which case all bets are off.
Not the OP, but my family has a bunch of Danish teak furniture, as does my mom. The sofas are not super heavy. Cushions on a frame. You can see under it. Now, there's no bed inside. My mom's was re-upholstered once. Ours isn't old enough for that yet. We've re-upholstered the dining chairs a couple of times.
As for other pieces of furniture, e.g., cabinets and stuff, we bought them used from a place that combed estate sales in Denmark for furniture and sold it in the US. One attraction is that the old furniture is smaller, so it works in a smaller house.
I also have my grandparent's danish teak dressers and dining table and chairs as well as some various side tables, lamps, bed, etc. I've acquired elsewhere. The all look wonderful and I get a nice feeling of connection to my family whenever I grab some socks, or sit down to eat, etc.
I owned a bunch of mid-century Danish/Swedish furnitures, and they're generally pretty light. They tend to have slimmer profiles for the "modern" appearance, so less material. Also solid wood tend to be lighter than engineered wood.
I bought a used Nieri leather sofa recently for a seventh of the original price. It is supposed to be a solid high end sofa (or so the seller said; it was the most expensive sofa of the hundred they were selling), but is feather light. I was suspicious, but bought it anyway because I liked it. So far it has withstanded the kid jumping on it in various ways.
I wonder, is it even possible it's solidly made despite being very light?
Two points actually: Teak is great. How it gets around to being a sofa is not. This is a doubly good thing you're doing keeping it going instead of disposing of it like most people would.
In the Midwest, the "better" option is to buy furniture from "The Amish".
Parents bought a living room set, it was double what a similar set would be at the local furniture superstore, but the fabric/cushions were a new level of terrible. Basically fell apart in two years.
It's a great place to find wooden tables, beds, dressers, but it's all heavy (as you'd expect) and hard to move.
If I was buying a sofa today I would get something from Stressless.
Although the furniture quality is excellent, I worry about supporting child labor when doing business with the Amish. They pull their kids out of school after grade 8 to put them to work. I've also heard various things regarding the commonality of abusive practices within their religion. Trade-offs for everything!
Like hell it is. What they want their kids learning is irrelevant, it's a travesty of "religious freedom" that we don't require this cult to educate their children to the same uniform standard as every other person in our society.
I dropped out of school in 9th grade. I make $200K a year. A friend of mine has a college degree and has been unemployed for a year.
There is no uniform standard of education in the US. Kids in the South are being taught that evolution is on par with intelligent design. Poor black kids in Baltimore have on average a 3rd grade reading level in high school, while rich kids a few counties away are taught when to use a backdoor roth ira. Don't even mention "no child left behind".
When I was 15, my brain was definitely pubescent and far from fully developed.
But I was able to make some money by fixing computers or translating stuff from English to Czech anyway. There was no exploitation in those labor relations just because I was young.
I am not manually skilled, but I can definitely see someone at 15 making a nice chair or a table instead.
I don't think that 15 y.o.s should be treated as fully adult, some limitations on their work are perfectly OK (no ardous work, no work underground etc.). But barring them from working altogether will probably slow their development down. Not everything can be learnt from books or models, some real-world practice, including the most basic elements of interaction with customers/employers, is necessary.
Yes, but the same is true (a bit less so) of an 18 year old and most places allow 18 year olds to work, drive, vote, join the military, enter into binding contracts as adults etc.
While teenagers are not fully adult in some ways, they are also very different from a 12 year old.
I mean, to some extend, but I don’t necessarily think that working is bad for a 13 year old. If they can work in a supermarket to earn some side income they can work anywhere (under limited guidance).
So not far off compulsory school age in the UK, which is approximately 16. We do not get accused of child labour.
Until recently you could work once you left school. Now you cannot do a full time job until you are 18, but can become an apprentice (so you get some training as well as working). There is nothing to stop you doing nothing.
The requirement to not work until you are 18 has not been particularly beneficial. Brought to you (IIRC) by the same government that massively expanded the higher education system (a huge increase in the proportion of people going to university) for no real benefit.
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 lot of books. 36" to 48" spans of fast growth pine will stretch and bow within a year or two. I designed my own book case. I went to a furniture making store. We went back and forth a few times. The biggest sticking point that took four attempts for the furniture maker to understand was where to put the fixed shelf. It does not go in the middle because that wastes space. We made it out of pine. 7' 8" tall, so that when standing it up, it will clear an 8ft ceiling in modern American homes. 22" wide shelves so they cannot flex. Fixed shelf to counteract gravity. Made specifically to carry paperback novels and similarly sized books. "Sand it three times, prime it, sand it, prime it, sand it, paint it, sand it, paint it, no I don't care that a single book case will cost $200." I bought 24 of them. Many hundreds of lineal feet of book cases. We still have them 24 years later and they are as good as new. And the paint job, because it is two layers of prime and two layers of paint, on a mirror surface, looks like you just took the item from the showroom floor.
I have a plywood bookcase I made to store cooking books. The cheapest plywood you can imagine from the big box store. But because of the structural design, 15 years later it still holds up without any bowing or flexing.
Modern furniture is absolute junk. Even the "good stuff."
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 income, how could you afford it)? Either people need to get paid more, or ???
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.
We need to raise the living wage, and the living standard of our people. But that's a separate discussion. The couch was not 10% of my gross annual income.
If you simply raise wages, then the people that make the furniture will also have their wages raised - which will increase the cost even further - it doesn't solve this problem and may even make it worse.
No matter how much money I make, I like to think there's price-tags I'd still balk at just because I don't want to be a sucker. Or get involved in status-signaling.. not sure which is worse.
So I started thinking about comparisons also. I like to go back to cups of coffee, and you could spend 6 bucks on coffee easily.. is a piece of furniture worth a thousand cups? Maybe. On the other hand, you could own like 3 cargo containers for this cash (think of the material involved), or a used car (think of the utility!).
So nah, this feels like way too much money, unless it's a mint condition antique that some king and queen used to sit on. A huge Belffin modular super sofa with 9 seats and 2 ottomans is less than $2k.
We drive a second-hand Toyota that we paid cash for. The previous car we racked up 200,000 miles before deciding to "upgrade." I wear worn out Skechers sneakers that have seen better days. The leather belt that holds up my pants is getting on for 20 years old. The red sweatshirt I am currently wearing is stained with paint and varnish and food, and has at least three holes in it.
I pay, very rarely, for good coffee outside of the home. I prefer the coffee I make at home. It costs me around 8c per cup, 12c if I steam some milk. Some really good beans that cost around $25 a pound. Admittedly the coffee is made on a Jura X8, or a WEGA espresso machine at the RV.
Nobody really comes in our house, so we're not status signalling to anyone other than this casual mention on social media about some stuff. Money is a tool, and deployed properly, can bring a lot of leverage to problems.
You're free to make a judgement, and would probably blow a gasket knowing what I dropped on three office chairs, but at the end of the day, I used the tools I have at my disposal.
My media consumption habits went off a cliff since the pandemic due to life circumstances. I am slowly picking up the pace again. I have read around 3,500 books, not all of which I keep on the shelves. A nearly complete list with reviews of many of them are on one of my personal blogs.
About 10 years ago I went shopping at Furnitureland South, mentioned in the article. The selection was a bit overwhelming, but we picked out a solid wood bedroom set from a manufacturer in Canada. It's held up great, as has my kids' IKEA bedroom furniture.
I've purchased couches from West Elm, Restoration Hardware, and a few other well-known places, and they've all been disappointing. From now on I'll stick to Furnitureland and IKEA, but I don't know if I have the energy to go couch shopping at Furnitureland.
Our kids destroy all the nice furniture (dumb ways, like sitting on couch soaking wet from the pool, spilling food, drawing on the cushion while doing homework or a project, doing gymnastics off the cushions, fort building). They aren’t actively destructive like attacking with scissors but I can’t see investing in nice furniture until they are adults (even teens can be rough as you can imagine). By then, I don’t know if I’ll care?
Ok, but I have no clue - either before or after reading this article - how to go about finding furniture that isn't junk. Truly, I can't figure it out. I've been to every furniture store in town and tried to figure it out via the internet, to no avail. For somebody who prefers to spend more money less often on actually good things that last a long time, but has neither the time nor inclination to be a hobbyist vintage store frequenter, what is one to do?
Furniture in the normal "furniture store" price ranges are built for price-sensitive markets with economies of scale. If you really want measurably higher quality furniture, you're probably going to want to look at brands with pricing an order of magnitude higher. This quality of furniture typically does not sell at high volume, so it is often only at specialty retailers, or is made-to-order.
A good place to start in my opinion is with the well regarded office-furniture brands, Herman Miller, Steelcase, Hon, etc. They are well experienced in making furniture that can handle abuse, because commercial furniture takes a lot of abuse. And as far as durability goes, they make durable furniture in the highest volumes and have the most reasonable prices you're going to get.
I don't really even want new furniture though. I want a way to find high quality used furniture that isn't super time consuming. The best options seem to be "go to all the vintage shops every week" and "check facebook marketplace / craigslist every day", and I just don't have that level of dedication.
I second your comment on high-quality foam. If you're looking at re-doing some old furniture or having your own made, study up on foam - not just the density - which is important - but also the type and grade. Decent stuff should last 25+ years - and be more comfortable along the way.
(A little tip - the density you want for proper comfort varies by the thickness of the cushion, the weight of the intended users, and the whether it's the seat bottom or the back. The back needing a softer foam.)
I have two pre-WWII Gispen chairs with thick foam seats, and only recently (last couple years) they started to dry out (become 'crispy' at the top surface). I suspect it is because I am not actively using them anymore, rather than because of their age.
The cookie popup of this site is some dark design to behold, I have to say. You need to disable every single "goal" one by one - once you have figured out this is the least worst option. You can otherwise disable the 1400 partners one by one.
This is completely illegal in Europe and I think it's illegal to serve this UI to an EU IP, even for non-EU websites.
Anyway, who cares, it's almost funny what lengths they go to to get you to accept cookies.
This article seems to make it an American (US) thing, but I can assure you the sofas here in Argentina are mostly shit. If you look under the hood, they are every bit as crap or worse than described in TFA.
It's not "cheap imports" either, I don't think sofas here are imported. They are made to order in my country. They are just garbage.
I'm talking about midrange and even higher priced sofas. If you see the armature, it's mostly crap wood with "lots of staples" as mentioned. And a fancy cover, of course.
I got a Lovesac Sactional after using a couch for years that was a handme down of a handmedown. I like it but it was not cheap (~4.5k). The modular nature fits our lifestyle so I'm willing to pay the premium. Having had to move a couch multiple times, I'm looking forward to just being able to break this one up into sections and take it out the door.
They've got an ingenious model from a profit perspective as well. Since you can't charge subscriptions for stuff like that, they can sell you pieces of a Sactional and then you can get more pieces as the space you live in gets bigger or your life style changes. They also sell additional covers so if you get bored of the previous ones, you can change the color without getting a new couch (though it is not easy to get them on and off).
My advice, wait until it's on sale. They regularly go for sale from 15-20%. If you aren't fussy about the type, Costco usually has them too.
I too bought into this system. My only grip is the cushions. They need to be regularly fluffed back out. Which does not give me good hope for the longevity of said cushions. The rest of it is fairly solid. The size I got would have taken a 3 man team to move/setup with a more traditional couch. I can do it myself in under an hour. Cleaning under them is pretty nice too as you can just pop out that one piece and clean under it quick.
- (though it is not easy to get them on and off)
no kidding. that was my second biggest gripe with this thing. I am in zero hury to use that feature.
I bought my Sactional in mid-December with a 25% discount. All of the reviews I found were very positive. This thing is a beast! I only wish I'd found a good rug before setting it up. It's on a tile floor but hasn't budged so far. I love its Lego-ness.
The center section of my last sectional broke after about four months. Should any section break, I can quickly replace that piece instead of having to "deal with it" or replace the whole thing.
We bought a pair of Sactional seats used for $1k. And I'm delighted that we did because we hate how uncomfortable it is for us. If you're thinking about dropping 10k+ on a Sactional set, keep your eyes open for used and even consider doing what we did and trialing a smaller section first.
Around 5 years ago I tore down my sectional sofa to the sticks and completely rebuilt it. This was around 5 years old at the time, and was a cheap sectional (at most $600, possibly less, I don't recall), my wife convinced me to go cheap because "the kids will destroy anything we get".
I will agree with the upholstery person in this article: it's not going to be worth it to pay someone to do it. I ended up reupholstering ours for around $500, but that's because I did all the labor myself. An amazing amount of work.
It was made with a lot of OSB, some of the most curved pine I've ever seen, and lots and lots of staples.
I fixed the frame by adding a variety of supports and glue and screws. The frame went from being barely sufficient to quite solid. I doubled the webbing and springs, and completely rebuilt the cushions. To an extent I used the existing fabric as the patterns for the new fabric, except: my wife wanted the cushions to have piping (that was a huge effort), and originally it had the back cushions built in and stuffed with polyfill, but I wanted to make them removable so I had to redesign the back and custom design the cushions.
The biggest mistakes I made were the foam I used for the cushions was way too firm. If I were to redo it I would do something like a 3 layer: firm, medium, maybe latex or low density memory foam. I'd also probably have used a leather considering all the effort I put in, largely to keep the cats at bay.
The real down side is that we're thinking of getting rid of it because it's really too big for our space, and unless I redo the cushions it's way too firm to use without additional pillows. But, despite all the work I put into it, I'd be willing to bet that we could't sell it, and probably couldn't give it away (selling furniture on craigslist is so frustrating).
The highest quality furniture can be found in antique stores or estate sales. Perhaps it's just me but my default has always been to buy old things with the idea that, if they've lasted this long, they'll probably last longer. I've always felt it was lower risk. But please don't all rush to buy old things; because I like the low prices too.
There are charity shops in the UK that get good furniture donated and they resell cheaply, the British Heart Foundation for example. You do have to check regularly to find something of a specific style/type though.
Sometimes they don't know what they have, I picked up a Herman Miller office chair for £30. It did have some paint specs on, which might have been why it was sold so cheaply. They came right off with a damp cloth though.
The part about springs is interesting because all the sofas I've owned in the past decade have used foam, and I don't miss springs... When they are new maybe it's ok, but over time they wear out and the sofa becomes really noisy and uncomfortable as they aren't even. The same thing with mattresses, I'm never buying a sprung mattress again.
I ordered a dresser once from a local store, they bought some cheap crap from Amazon and passed it off as "shipping from storage". It arrived broken and I couldn't get my money back, which I probably would have if I got something similar through an online retailer.
Let’s be real too: nobody’s going underneath the sofas at Crate and Barrel to see how they’re constructed. It doesn’t really matter that you can see and touch them.
I don’t even think the luxury brands are much better (e.g., RH). They’ll give you some solid woods and finer materials where you can see them. They are better but not by the amount I would like.
The cheapness isn’t something these manufacturers need to do, it’s just in their interest. Higher margins, more repeat purchases.
It’s not like salaries are high in big furniture production countries like Vietnam. They could do things in a more labor intense way and still make a profit. It’s just that they’ll make more money by making the construction cheap, and making a product that lasts decades is a good way to restrict future business.
> nobody’s going underneath the sofas at Crate and Barrel to see how they’re constructed.
I also don't really know what to look for. Most people don't.
In the past you could more or less rely on the store being somewhat reliable and somewhat trustworthy. I say "somewhat" because of course you wouldn't fully trust a salesman, but by and large: you could more or less trust that something was "quality" if it was advertised as such, and/or more expensive and the cheaper options, usually. You didn't need to have a Ph.D. in sofa construction to buy a decent sofa.
Now it's best to assume everything is a lie. Everyone is lying to your face, or just don't know what the they're talking about. Even expensive items marketed as "quality" cannot be relied on being quality at all.
Once upon a time a sofa was a product sold on the market because some people needed sofas, and some people and/or companies knew how to make them. "A fair product for a fair market-conform price". Classic capitalism and free-market economics where everyone wins.
But now it no longer matters if people need sofas, or whether anyone actually gets anything remote to a "fair deal", or any externalities like climate change, or if kids in Vietnam are being exploited. Burn the world, as long as I can sell my crummy sofa, because "free market allows it" is the only logical and moral argument that exists for some people. A sofa is no longer a product; it's just the means to making a profit. There's a subtle difference between to two.
All of this is part of "the financialisation of everything" and "toxic capitalism" that's been going on since the 80s.
>Burn the world, as long as I can sell my crummy sofa, because "free market allows it"
That is classic capitalism. Econ 101 notions of efficient free markets rely on all participants being perfect rational actors with perfect information. Snake oil salesmen have always relied on the fact that those assumptions are inaccurate.
I hate buying furniture because it's easy to tell that most of what's out there is utter junk, but not very easy to figure out what's at least decent but isn't super expensive. Or what's expensive but not just marked up.
This is how I've begun to feel about almost every consumer product out there these days. This "enshittification" of the bulk of the output of our economy puts so much burden on any discerning consumer to do all the research needed just to get some basic dignified standard of quality from whatever they are forking over hard-earned money for. It will soon make more sense to put all that time and money into producing these things yourself via some micro cottage industry. (Personally I already do this for a growing number of things.)
It's really depressing that we have gotten to this point, seemingly the logical conclusion of the so-called efficient capitalist market.
The best way to acquire a quality sofa is to purchase a used one made by a furniture maker known to create high quality pieces. It requires a bit of research. You need to figure out which builders around you produced excellent furniture 50 or more years ago. In the USA, Dunbar is an example. Buy an old Dunbar sofa from the 1950s and reupholster it. It will easily last another 100 years.
Because people don't want to pay for good plywood, proper webbing, and quality fabrics. Real furniture weighs a lot, and doesn't make sense to ship around the planet.
Thus, people get foam, OSB, and cardboard in a fake canvas bag.
Good upholsterers are hard to find, often eccentrics, and usually will not tolerate cheapskates. If you own something pricey like a boat or restaurant, than most are happy to get something that will last. Even a few yards of period correct fabrics or leather is more expensive than the typical Ikea living room set.
One needs to learn these things if you want to stay married. lol =)
Next time you stay at a mid-range or better hotel, notice the furniture. They don't but junk because in the long run it never lasts, and whose going to pay for a nice hotel room with tacky furniture?
A couple of months ago, we stayed in a newer Holiday Inn Express. The bed and cabinets were very nice and well built.
They revamp furniture more often than you might realize, because even great quality stuff looks tired and worn after awhile. Investigate and you can usually find the liquidator in your area that handles them.
Or common areas in offices / apartment buildings.
For example, the building I live in has nice couches that look like they can take a lot of traffic.
I once looked at the brand tag - Ligne Roset. It’s not cheap, but at least does seem high quality.
We got a couple of secondhand ex-living room sofas very cheap. IKEA. Full leather, looked nice and an absolute dream to sit and lie on, just exactly the right combination of firm and soft.
These were for the kid areas. They had reduced the previous (IKEA Ektorp) sofas to rubble over a couple of years. These new ones didn't last long at all. The suspension underneath the cushions is criss-crossed webbing in a softwood frame. Well you can imagine, a 90lb child jumping on that, the forces that develop. And then the frame breaks at the front. And there's nothing structural at the front of the sofa, just some 1/4" thick fiberboard, to anchor replacement frame material to so you can't really fix it.
Oh well. One of them now has solid plywood - very well fastened to what structural elements are available - so it's now very firm but the kids don't care. The other, I had the inspiration of mounting the plywood lower and putting another layer of cushioning in there (leftover seat cushions from the demolished Ektorp sofas). That's actually pretty good.
But without rambunctious kids, these sofas, which were already 10-15 years old, would have lasted quite a while longer. It's wizardly, the seating comfort they got out of such simple and cheap materials.
Made the mistake of buying a couch off Wayfair for a little nook in my office. It lasted a year before I got rid of it. Never again. Couches really are one of those areas where you get what you pay for. With the possible exception of Ikea. Got an Ikea couch for my 10 year old's room and its holding up remarkably well.
Maybe I got lucky, but I am quite happy with the desk I got from wayfair a couple years ago. It may not be fancy, but it's sturdy, durable, customizable, and probably less than half the cost of a high-end solid hardwood desk.
We bought some sofas secondhand when moving into our first home. They were great, and they held up well for many years. But ultimately we sold them and bought new ones because we didn't know if they had the fire-retardant chemicals that used to be mandated in CA (until they were discovered to be carcinogenic). The new sofa (from Costco) seems good but the sofa chairs (from Wayfair) are not so good.
It seems like the frame in the back has some sort of support that is made out of a material that is closer to cardboard than wood. When our kids run into it, the back of the chair deforms a bit and has to be bent back. I have no idea why the frame of a chair would be made out of something so weak. I expect we'll have to replace them in 5 years or so, and we'll aim for something more old-school.
Sofa bases seems to be getting shitter and shitter as manufactures value engineer with increasingly more low quality engineered wood. At this point my next sofa frame is going to be sturdy metal outdoor furniture. I've also seen a few tiktok sponcon videos of sofas with industrial plastic molded frame, like industrial pallets. Probably not enviromentally friendly, but seems durable.
Seems like Sofas are last to make the economical steel channel furniture jump, you can get tons of sturdy/durable bedframes for like $100 shipped on Amazon. Most cheap metal futon frames also last forever if it wasn't for the moving mechanical components. I'd like to see more steel + bolt sofas.
This only makes sense when upholsterers dont cost more than buying an entirely new sofa. My family used to reupholster furniture every 5 years and it was cheap because my mother had an interior design firm and got very good rates.
I tried the same here in the US with some high end Scandinavian furniture ($5k), the quote was up to 1x what I originally paid. In the end it made sense to just buy new again.
The cost of labor of where you reside has a significant effect on whether you purchase another 'junk' piece of furniture.
Not a sofa; but I'm sitting in an Ecornes Stressless recliner.
It's the best piece of furniture I've ever bought. It's made from "engineered wood", covered in quite good leather; I should have chosen a lower grade of leather, because hide isn't as easy to look after as some of the lower-grade leathers.
FTR, I've bought sofas and armchairs from artisan/craftsman makers, from junk shops, and I've also bought cheap disposable shit. After the Stressless, my best buys were all from junk shops. But this Stressless, I more-or-less live in it.
Built my own sofa. Fabric from JOANN, foam from a shitty IKEA thing thrown on the street, some plywood and pine from Home Depot, hardware, staples. Cost me $75. It's comfy and I can lay on it or sit on it. What the fuck about this is supposed to cost >$1,000, I have no idea. Are they stuffing sofas with live minks or something? It's just wood, bolts, foam and fabric.
For cushions I already had some, but you can easily make them with more JOANN fabric and a big box of poly stuffing. Extremely basic sewing skills and a pair of scissors are all you need.
I'm generally very skeptical of brand/store loyalty type arguments, but lately I've found that in the US, Macy's furniture is still good value for good quality. I've had to completely furnish a few rooms over the last couple of years and looked at all the usual, e.g.: costco, ikea, wayfair, jordan's, etc., as well as expensive hand-made local shops, and I keep ending up at Macy's in the end.
The key aspect that allows the businesses to get away with this is the buying frequency. You might buy a couch once every 10 years so it's very difficult to judge quality. Whereas with something like coffee beans I'm buying it every week so I have 52 opportunities every year to analyze the quality and change brand. The couch seller knows you probably won't make a repeat purchase so it's all about marketing tricks.
I am happy with my Lovesac sofa, too. It was expensive, but I can't think of another product I could expect to be as happy with, so Lovesac seems to be in a class of their own and can demand whatever price they want.
In particular, it's comfortable, well built, but not bulky. I can take it apart move it in my regular sized SUV if needed. I move a lot, and eventually grew tired of bulky things that were difficult or impossible to move without professional help.
I also tried a Burrow sofa which has the same modular properties, but it was not comfortable at all and I had to return it
Soon the cheapest Ikea sofa I could find in 2015 (about 200 $) has lasted me a decade. Sure, the cover worn is worn out and covered with another textile for that reason, but it's still usable. I can sit on it and watch my TV, which is even older.
Easiest way to find happiness in material quality of life is to lower one's standards.
After being burned by this many times, finally got a couple Chesterfield style sofas from Costco about 4 years ago and everything about them has been rock solid. And they were about $700 each.
I later wanted something matching for a different room - but the problem is, the Costco furniture changes seemingly every day and you never see the same thing again.
Many very good, long-lasting pieces of furniture come on the estate market for very cheap because a) no one wants to move the giant solid-wood china cabinet, or b) you can get a $15 sofa or table mailed to you, why would you want an ugly flower pattern on something that has already outlasted one owner?
Look for Thomasville, Drexel, or similar from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lots of midcentury modern, if you like that sort of thing, but plenty of other designs.
I'm writing this on a desk (currently missing the leather insert in the top) made of solid pecan. We got a 10' china cabinet, dining table that seats 12, and chairs for $300 a while back.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen stackable bookshelves from the 30s-60s lately and they were getting somewhat expensive, which puts a crimp on my obsession to decorate entirely with books.
They are bad because they don't cost 10-15k. Human bodies are difficult. They weigh quite a bit and often move about. Put multiples of them onto the object then stresses and strains will add up. Want that object to look cool, perform perfectly for multiples of years then you have a challenge!
This is why I trust IKEA’s price to quality ratio. I know I won’t be getting the highest quality, but I will likely be getting the highest quality to price ratio.
Got this one in 2016 for $1,100, and it’s survived 2 kids with minimal pilling. It won’t impress anyone, but I have no problem using it.
Yeah, the correct choices for furniture these days are basically: used (cheap if you’re not buying something trendy like mid century modern), IKEA, or super-expensive really-good stuff. Anything new that’s cheaper than that last category’s usually just gonna be as bad or worse than IKEA, plus 1.2x-5x the price. And likely uglier.
I think even showy luxury brands like RH do better than West Elm. CB2 as well, which is a slight step up from Crate and Barrel.
West Elm and the whole Pottery Barn set of brands are just worse versions of Crate and Barrel, with terrible customer service to go with it. They had some of the most mean and rude customer service agents I’ve ever talked to. They acted like the store was an entirely different company, then the store acted like I needed to call the national call line. Plus, they outsource deliveries in a very annoying blame-shifting way.
At least at RH you get a single human point of contact who can handle everything like a concierge experience.
Not really ironic. It's available in 10 different fabric options. If you're surprised that a wool/alpaca blend fabric isn't heard wearing, or that boucle snags easily then you didn't think through the purchase. I have a similar sofa with the Beck fabric and it's great for the way I use it. The flambier boucle fabric looks great, but as a cat owner, I'd never purchase it.
$2700 is what I got mine for. I think price might have been lowered to $2300 now.
It's built in Poland. Solid wood with steel reinforcement in the form of steel tubing in places, springs, and then a pillow system on top of that. The firm making it is the Swedish company SITS.
But I think one has to actually sit in a bunch of couches to see whether they're good.
I do agree with this. When you build them yourself and see the underneath of them they really aren’t that awful compared to a store couch that is possibly using even worse construction techniques.
The only problem I have with them is that they have almost no couch designs that have a more plush style. Almost all of them are firmer foams and just plain not appealing designs.
Jumping in with the pro-IKEA crowd. I've had a KIVIK since 2017 that has survived me, my wife, and friends incredibly well. It's moved with us 3 times and still is in great shape. Easily the best value piece of furniture currently in my home.
I just bought a sofa 6 months ago. It was my first time buying a big piece of furniture from a proper furniture store. It's (allegedly) American made. It is one of those pull-out queen bed convertible things, and that part is fantastic. The couch is nearly identical to the pull-out-bed couches I see in hotels. The only difference is the fabric. The bed mechanism is rock solid, but the couch itself is creaky and the cushions are already noticeably deformed. It's like they wrapped a great, tried-and-true bed mechanism inside a much shittier couch. It's clearly a step above Wayfair detritus, and I certainly didn't break the bank to get it, but I'm still a little disappointed.
Has anyone found good options that are between stapled together cardboard with cheap foam that will fail in a couple years or $5000 and up designer brands? I love buying high quality goods that will last a lifetime but who has $5k for a couch/sofa?
If you're looking to reupholster, I've had great luck with https://www.slipcovershop.com/. They make custom slipcovers and sell affordable cloth by the yard that you can use to easily reupholster stuff yourself if the shape is not too complex.
Other than that, I wish this article went less into things that don't matter (properly sized brackets are no worse, and sometimes better, than joinery, etc.) and more into the ergonomics, types of foam and other materials that actually matter. Like, how do I tell how long a cushion filling or fabric will last, or tell if there are springs that will sag without taking it apart.
I have 3 sofas and all of them were free. One is from a neighbor and the other two from the Buy Nothing group on Facebook. I have never been able to convince myself that any piece of furniture is worth the thousands of dollars that an average couch costs. The one exception being the bed (which is the actual most important piece of furniture anyone owns).
What truly baffles me is how, in my middle-class suburban hometown, all of these families were able to furnish their massive 3-5 bedroom homes. Many families, including my own, would have a living room that was mostly for show (because hanging out happened in the den/TV room) yet contained thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of furniture.
The modern professional "middle class" was once called the petit bougeuosie and characterizes itself by trying to replicate aristocratic aesthetics and lifestyles with earned wages, which is mostly a lost cause and just creates a endless treadmill of labor and consumption.
Good on you for being so thoroughly free of the compulsion that they're an alien bafflement to you!
What you describe doesn't seem "enormous" at least as bedrooms are normally used in descriptions. I have a den/living room which is what we normally use with company as we don't really watch TV so there isn't one there. That has a sofa from my brother. A couple other good futons elsewhere (guest bedroom and a very small TV room) but just futons. And that's about it.
I have a cheap sofa today made of the sawdust and glue. I had “good” sofas before made of hardwood. They both feel fine under your butt and get wrecked by the cat before long. The new one comes apart in pieces so one person can easily move it in or out of a doorway or stairwell. Maybe the “joinery” is worse but who cares? It does the job and is easier to deal with, and that’s probably why these things have replaced the old beasts. Plus if you are interested in things like the joinery under your upholstered furniture there are still people who will cater to that for a premium you’d justify somehow.
We picked them because they were one of very few UK suppliers who could supply a sofa that's not covered in toxic flame retardants (the UK has kept some very dubious legislation in place on this issue, I think mainly because the industry lobbies for it as a protectionist measure).
The sofa we bought was on the expensive side, but not ridiculous. It's also seems beautifully made in general, and was carefully delivered by the firm themselves, who spent about half an hour manouevring it in.
Don’t get me started on flame retardants. It’s definitely lobbying. So they can use cheaper materials which tend be more flammable then just drench it in toxic liquid and call it job done
Sometimes there's a lowest common denominator that puts pressure on everyone else to reduce quality & value, especially gradually over the long run.
When it comes to sofas there's a less common low, and that's "model home" furniture.
These upholstered representations look just like the real thing but they are not counterfeits, merely imitations of what it would look like if the model home were to be equipped with actual furniture where its usefulness was a consideration.
Occasionally appearing on the second-hand market so caveat emptor.
Lots of people suggesting buying second-hand because the old stuff is made better - and it really is. The problem with thrifting is that everyone is doing it. The word is out. Price goes up and supply dwindles.
Same situation with buying used cars. New cars suck. You can't work on them yourself and they have terrible UX. So people started only looking for used. Except the used prices skyrocketed to match supply & demand.
We can't keep this up. We can't all keep thrifting. Everyone knows it's better, everyone is on the prowl, and everyone has easier access to buyers, thanks to the internet.
This is a good dig into changes in design and manufacturing trends, which makes sense for Dwell, but I suspect we'd see more people complaining about their furniture quality these days even without manufacturing changes because many people are like 50% heavier than the people in sitting in couches 50 years ago -- and often more likely to collapse into a sofa than to set themselves down upon it.
So it's actually kind of a two sided loss in quality: the designs are flimsier even while the engineering requirements have become more demanding.
I've had a two-seat sofa from Living Spaces since.... 2017 and it's held up really well. Even the cushions have no wear despite my dog loving "digging" into them (basically scratching for a while digging an imaginary hole). I think this sofa was like $800 plus tax/delivery but I sit on it every day and it's held up really well, especially through one move.
I think there's probably just quality:price tiers and mine happens to be in the economical but decent quality range.
I know I'm going to sound like an old person shouting about how "they don't make'm like they used to", but it's honestly true. This isn't just sofas - it's almost everything. Businesses know that it's far cheaper to make something look high quality than to actually make it high quality. And if you can make it seem expensive, then you can charge expensive prices for it.
In the mid 80s I had a sofa and wing-back chair made by a little factory called Bader and Fox(?) in Portland OR. I went to the factory (the two owners were the only ones there) and picked out fabric/style/etc with some special instruction about the angle of the arms and stiffness of the stuffings. Cost about $1600.
Best furniture ever. Carted across the country twice. I still use both pieces every day. They've been reupholstered once.
One of the draws of the DTC model (and IKEA) is the apparently heavily commission-based pay structure of the sales staff of most brick-and-mortar furniture stores.
Sofas and rugs are inherently labor-intensive things to make well, where quality materials make a huge difference. I grew up with real wool-silk rugs my parents brought over from old country, or my dad bought on work trips to Afghanistan or Pakistan. I never gave them a second thought until I bought my own house and tried to furnish it. What I had thought were just regular rugs would cost $5,000+ in America.
I have nothing to contribute but this video from comedian Rob Paravonian It's probably 20+ years old, but it frequently pops into my mind when I think about the apartments I lived in during my 20s. The materials were shoddy, but the price was right!
My Room and Board sofa from 2011 is still rock solid. I was a bit nervous buying it used a few years ago because of the age but it turned out to be a great purchase.
Yep, my only complaint was that an obese buddy of mine wore out a seam but R&B were good about it and sent someone out to fix it onsite. It's going on 10 yo and still looks new.
When we moved to the US with two babies last year it was very important for us to buy non-toxic furniture. We ended up buying a sofa and chairs from Medley. Their products are made in LA out of wood and are free of formaldehyde, flame retardants, and PFAS. It's been only a year but it looks like the furniture is going to last.
Bought an Ikea particle board couch back in 2017 and it's still going strong despite heavy use by two fat people and 3 moves where it was dis/re-assembled. I recently added a support to the armrest where the unbacked fiberboard had caved in a bit.
Sure, quality furniture is great but I'll wait until we settle down. For now, no regrets.
My wife and I spent a couple grand on a "leather" couch about 5 years ago.
A little over a year ago the "leather" started developing holes in it from wear all over the place. The so called leather is literally paper thin and bonded to some low quality fabric.
I've never had this sort of problem with a couch before. It's very frustrating.
heh, nice leather shoes or boots cost in the hundreds, no way you're getting that much leather at any kind of decent quality for that price. maybe starting at 10x that.
The funny thing is someone told me this in an IRC channel about 20 years ago, a full decade before I'd even be in a position to buy my own sofa. Can't remember which channel it was, certainly wasn't a sofa-related channel, probably Linux related. I've never forgotten it for some reason.
When my grandma passed away I took the sofa because I was a poor student in need of a sofa.
After about 10 years of daily use I started to notice some of the cushions sagging. Asked the family when she bought the couch and it predates my birth by about 10 years. Talk about quality.
I look through the antiques subreddit often and lots of really nice quality furniture is hardly valued now because it's out of style. A good quality sofa should be able to be re-foamed and fabriced forever but I think we're all just too mindset on cheap and disposable since that's the easiest route.
Is there "open hardware" in this space? Someone was selling laser-cut frames and sofas that you assemble, which made me wonder if anyone has gone whole-hog and created reasonable open designs for laser-cut, diy sofas.
I have a leather Benchmade Modern couch that has lasted half a decade no problem now. I think they switched facilities/materials at one point though ..but I got grandfathered into the real wood, better facility when I got my second couch (I called and asked)
Ashley has a fair amount of their furniture made in North Carolina. It's obviously not at the same quality level as something like a Stickley, but if you want US-made furniture from a mainstream brand, they're a good choice.
The article seems to exaggerate a bit, because neither in 2024, nor in 2004, would I have expected a $1,200 couch to be 'well-made'. (Although I wouldn't expect either one to actually fall apart in two years of use.)
People aren't willing to pay thousands for furniture anymore.
My Rowe furniture sofa is 21 years old now and sits as if it was new. If I have a problem, I'll get it reupholstered or just order a new cushion from the manufacturer.
A while back I moved half way across the country, the only two pieces of furniture I took with me were the standing desk and a leather sofa. Cost a lot to have them moved.
Whatever else goes on in my life, I've got that sofa problem handled.
I wish I could find a sofa that was designed for repairability. The only thing that ever wears out is the cushioning under the seat but I've never been able to find someone who offers repair services.
I have always found that the best sofas are the ones you least expect. Never a rich person's big fancy sofa but some girlfriend's, who lives in her tiny apartment, beat up, sofa, for example.
Most people buy IKEA sawdust or are low information consumers, and the market responds accordingly. As such, people don't buy fine furniture or understand how to discern quality in a specific durable good.
Most are cheap junk bought sight unseen. My stressless couches are built from real wood, full grain leather, etc... My eames chair likewise. But you're adding a 5-10x multiplyer to furniture costs for that quality.
What the hell, share my data with them and 1400 parters to read this, an No easy way to just say “Fuck No”. This kind of site design should be illegal.
Second hand sofa market is surprisingly good in all cities ai lived in (Europe) You can get great stuff for less than 100eur. Good luck figuring out there transport and cleaning though.
in my experience when it comes to sofas the old "buy cheap buy twice" holds true. there are reputable brands such as ligne roset for example. they are pricey bit if you can commit to buying and owning for > 15 years. owning a clam and a togo for more than ten years and the are basically like new. foam & fabric. i understand this might unaffordable to a lot of people but buying second hand can be a great deal on high end sofas.
I bought a sub $700 leather coach from Costco in 2007. It lasted 6 moves and 16 years until my kids finally found its weak point (leather seams at the cushioning and back) playing “the floor is lava.” Honestly, it’s probably repairable even after that, but the wife wanted new furniture anyways.
I haven’t had to replace any of the relatively cheap stuff I’ve gotten from cost plus world market over a decade.
I might just be lucky or special, but I don’t think cheaper furniture is necessarily bad or throwaway. I’m not sure what the trick is. We’ve tended to buy robust looking furniture— solid wood dining table, welded metal dining chairs, a plush and thick sofa. Frankly, our stuff looked very pedestrian compared to some of our friends, but it has lasted.
Yup. A few years ago I bought a $1500 sofa from I think BluDot? It was trash. It rocked back and forth on a flat, level floor because the legs weren't all the same length. One of the legs was already cracked when it was delivered (independent from the different lengths problem). And the cushions were absurdly hard, but also too soft. I didn't take the cushions apart to see what was going in there but it felt like you were sitting on a wooden board with a way-too-soft spring underneath. They offered a 10-day return policy, and what do you know, when I requested a return on day 2 and then again on day 5 and then again days 6,7,8,9,10,11 ... they just didn't respond, until eventually like a month later I managed to get someone on the phone and they told me the 10day window had already elapsed so no backsies. When I left a bunch of 1star angry reviews calling them a fraud on every website I could think of, someone hired some mover-on-demand service and an old minivan showed up at my house to take it away. The mover didn't know where they were supposed to take it to. I gave them the store address where I bought it. What an absolute trash company.
Years later I spent $3500 on a sofa from Design Within Reach and it's terrific.
IMO, yes - Its a lot harder to stay in business selling trashy products when you deal with people face to face in a given location, and hope to be there for years.
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.
I dunno, but "design" sofas aren't that bad. Of course, you pay for this. My modular Cor Trio sofa has a list price of 6,500€ in the configuration I own. See [1] for a simpler one.
One contributing factor is the fabric you choose. But the biggest one is labor. The wooden construction uses only solid wood too but that is the least cost either way.
What I did when buying it is that I made a list of all design furniture shops in Berlin that sold Cor.
Then I drove to each of them and asked: this is my best price from your competitors. What is yours? In the end I actually paid 4,500€. I also learned the margin is ~45% of the list price for the shop.
Which gives you an idea about material and labor prices when you produce in Europe. I.e. Cor sells this to the shop for around 3k€. That already includes their margin. I would think producing this has costs of at least 50% of that attached. I.e. 1.5k€ for labor and materials.
I just started helping a friend re-produce an old design classic of his [2] as WFH has made requests for it spike. It's not a sofa, strictly speaking, but the changes in costs probably make it worth mentioning them in this context.
When we produced the first series, ca. 2004, we had material, CNC and labor costs of around 1,000€. Without upholstery. Upholstery varies greatly depending on finish. Different fabrics and leathers have very different prices and labor costs attached.
We are now looking at over 4k€ for labor and wood (it's made of Ceiba which is difficulty to source). I.e. we have a ~300% raise in production costs over 20 years in Europe (not counting upholstery!).
If we wanted to keep the previous price, we needed to switch to cheaper wood and move production outside of Europe. At the moment we are just considering targeting a wealthier clientele. Not everyone has this luxury though.
I guess I'm saying I dunno how much these factors play a role in the enshittification of sofas everywhere. But they probably do ... :]
I can’t read the site due to a massive “We value your privacy” pop up informing me about the 1532 data-harvesting “partners” they sell information to, and there’s only “Allow All” button accessible (which is illegal by GDPR).
They really value my privacy, for its resale value.
>There are absolutely sturdy, beautifully made sofas constructed in the United States. There are custom designer pieces made here or in France or Italy or Scandinavia, which tend to be prohibitively expensive for the masses. But low- and mid-priced sofas are a relatively new phenomenon, and, frankly, they often suck.
But do they suck less than not having a sofa at all? I am a several-time-over beneficiary of cheap made-in-southeast-asia sofas. Shipped in a fridge-sized box right to my doorstep, assembled (by me) in ~15min, and perfectly serviceable. Is it up to the same quality level as a $5000 made-in-USA solid wood hand-woven twine-joinery (etc etc) masterpiece? No, but I couldn't have afforded that kind of sofa. And it didn't have to be hand-packed by a furniture transportation expert, and it didn't weigh 800 lbs.
I don't really see the "loser" here exactly - broke grad students, college kids, people in rural areas, and starving artists win; workers in developing countries win (the furniture factory sure beats the rice paddies); Instagram-sofa tech bros win. And gilded solid wood sofa makers can always market to the rich, who can afford to spend several months' worth of my rent cost on a piece of furniture.
...not to mention furniture stores seem to keep no inventory, so you get it 6-8 weeks after you buy because that's how it takes them to build and ship your new couch
This article about about sofas opens with "The most important piece of furniture in your home..."
Did anyone else find this weird / funny?
Like, just off the top of my head I'd put my bed at the top of my list, waaaay ahead of a sofa. Next might be the desk & chair I WFH at, and then it goes on from there.
I get that the article wants to build engagement by "raising the stakes", but c'mon. Sofas are not that important :)
I get there would be some caveats here, but when it comes to furniture others see, for most beds and office chairs are down on the list. Of furniture guests are apt to see and use the sofa is pretty high up.
"Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
I've been pretty stunned during my travels to find that it's really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk. No other culture seems nearly as interested, and some actively discourage it in favor of more real, personal topics. It's one of those things where once you start noticing it, it just gets cringier and cringier.
Not everyone lives in sitcoms or spends all their free time watching TV...
The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over. And even then we're usually doing other things than just lazing about.
> really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk
For one, it doesnt seem like americans are significant outliers in tv consumption[1] or smartphone usage[2]. For another, yeah if you're a foreign traveller people probably aren't going to make small talk with you about TV or other pop culture...
I'm not speaking to consumption, I'm speaking to small talk. There's no good reason to believe there's a tight correlation there.
Americans constantly shove TV into the conversation even if they don't know that the other person or people are familiar with it. Though many are aware of American media output by virtue of the cultural colonialism enacted since brute force fell out of fashion. Even if they're not explicitly speaking about TV they're still doing the IRL version of posting reaction GIFs by quoting memes in response to earnest conversation.
> "Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
I think you may be engaging in a bit of axe grinding here! I agree that the sofa is one of the post important pieces of furniture in my home [1], but for reasons that have nothing to do with television. There is no TV in the room! But it is still where I spend the most time sitting during downtime, reading books, talking to my family, etc. And when I have friends over, we're either there or at the dining room table.
[1] For the title of the most important, I might have picked my bed. But that's a quibble.
> The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over.
You make it sound like this is not merely a rare thing for you, but that it should be rare... I don't just passively sit and watch much television and yet I have spent an incredible amount of time in my life sitting on either my couch or the couch of a friend -- or even one of many couches at an office -- talking and laughing and having fun with other human beings. If I had to choose only one: a couch or a dining table, I'd go with a couch. Now... bed? That's harder for me, but I can totally see people deciding couch (as you can sleep on the couch but it is awkward as hell to invite people over and only have a bed to use).
And while 2-4 people are playing pool, where's everybody else? On various sitting furniture. I think we need to go one step further, and revive the conversation pit. (aka, the supercouch)
Not to interrupt your principled tirade against lazy Americans or whatever, but it's not a "claim", let alone an ideological one. It's just a bog standard literary device for framing a puff piece.
> "Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
My family doesn't watch TV. I purchased my sofa when I didn't even have a TV.
The most important aspect of my living room arrangement is how well it facilitates long, deep, conversations with friends who come over for visits.
I have 3 pieces of seating in my living room, a chair for reading placed next to a book case (large enough that a couple small kids can sit in the lap of an adult who is reading with them if so desired), a smaller 2 person sofa, and a larger 6ft long sofa.
I know plenty of other families who have similar arrangements with sofas so placed as to emphasize socialization with friends.
Now if we are talking about the 90s and early 2000s, yeah, it was all about amazing TV watching experiences.
> The only time I'm on my couch is when I have a few people over. And even then we're usually doing other things than just lazing about.
The couch is where you retire to after dinner has been finished and everything cleaned away. Board games may occur in other rooms (depending on one's coffee table situation) the of course a room that is laid out for conversation is going to see the most use when there are people over to have a conversation with.
FWIW now that I have a kid, I am hosting social events more often than ever before (watching children has a negative co-efficient for small values of n > 1, 3 kids are easier to watch than 1!), but even in my DINK life (at which point I didn't even own a TV), my couch got plenty of use.
> "Most important piece of furniture" is a heavily loaded ideological claim. It points to the rampant American culture surrounding media consumption.
That's quite a leap. Did you consider that dwell.com might not have actually done a study on what Americans consider the "most important piece of furniture" but just used that phrase to justify the very existence of their article?
I'm not making any claims about the preferences of Americans but about the default assumptions of the authors. It is as good a reflection of cultural attitudes as any.
Are you sure it's "Americans" or is it the Internet? Our experience of Americans may not be identical. Even just my co-workers and family seem to rarely if ever be aware of the same things on television I care about, granting I watch far more nature documentaries than anything else and had no access to broadcast networks until they launched streaming services in the last couple years since I cord cut around 2011 or so. The only thing from the past 15 years I can think of that seemed widely at least known about to most people I talked to was Game of Thrones, but even that was far from universal. My HVAC guy commented that I looked different because I had long hair and a ponytail the last time he saw me a few years ago and I said it was because I grew my hair out for Khal Drogo cosplay and he had no clue what I was talking about. He'd never even seen Game of Thrones or probably any other television. I actually remember that about two of my ex-girlfriend's dads from when I was in my early 20s. They were both small business owners and had no knowledge whatsoever about pop culture. They were so focused on their businesses that they never watched any television or saw any films.
In any case, even though there is nothing on television I watch with any regularity currently, I would still rate my sofa as a fairly important piece of furniture. Not as important as my bed, but it is the largest piece of furniture and the centerpiece of my largest room. My kitchen/living room is open floor plan townhouse and I cook quite a bit, and I can't just stand all day, so that's where I rest, even though I'm just listening to music when I do so and not watching television. When I lay down to read a book, that's also usually where I do it. If I take a nap during the day, it's typically on the sofa. We usually eat dinner there, too, even though we're not watching television, just because it's more comfortable than any other place we have to sit. I even work from my sofa pretty frequently.
But I've got no complaints, personally. I paid $300 or so at the PX when I joined the Army almost 20 years ago and bought my first house and still have the same sofa. It certainly didn't fall apart on me. It's moved with me four times. My wife and I debate getting a nice one but always decide not to because our cats are going to tear it up and puke on it all the time anyway.
> I've been pretty stunned during my travels to find that it's really only Americans who obsessively talk about or reference TV shows and movies in their small talk.
It's a slight exaggeration, but yeah. I've really started noticing it on HN and some news-ish sites too, over the past couple of years: where a book would normally be used as a reference point, now a film is more commonly used instead.
Adult Americans read so few books per year, on average, that it’s barely an exaggeration to assert that we don’t read books at all. And most of what we do read is romance novels or juvenile fiction. Been like that for a while.
Does media consumption include "conversing with guests?" The sofa is the place everybody goes to chat unless we're having a meal.
Frankly, we'd probably use it a little less if our dining chairs were more comfortable, and I do think there's a very good case to be made that dining room chairs are more important than the sofa, but nonetheless, I really don't think a sofa is especially tied to TV culture in any way.
If we're going to be doing something rather than lazing around or eating, we're not going to be in the house at all.
Glad to hear everyone agrees that most couches are pretty subpar. I bought $10,000 worth of stuff from a high end furniture place because the French girl started working there. Then that boat got stuck in the Suez Canal, the shipping container finally arrived months late, and it was empty. So I got a full refund and she still got her huge commission, and after reading this the couch probably sucked.
The factory was a real place; the frames were made of solid wood and plywood, there was a sewing floor and even one (incredibly kooky) person whose sole job was to stuff the pillows. This guy was in a little room full of feathers all day, and they'd follow him around to the cantina and bathroom like a cartoon character.. but I digress.
My job there for a while was to make the sofa legs -- that was a sixteen step process, and they didn't even trust me to glue the boards together, just to do the cuts and shape the pieces. Sand and stain and wax and polish, yes sir!
They had a dedicated delivery crew, and what the article mentions about packaging is true -- things would be blanketed and wrapped up just the right way, then tetris-ed onto the truck. Sitting shotgun on that truck and hauling sofas up stairs and through various spaces was what I did after making the legs got too boring.
These sofas sold for $3000 ~ $4000 and up, and that was at the break of the millennium. I think the cheapest chair they had was around $2000. I should really swing by the showroom and see how much these are now -- and whether they're still made like they used to be.