Sofas: How Low Can You Go? - Gardenista
Is there anything scarier than a sofa? And our 26-inch-high side tables looked like they were bullying it. Photographs by Mimi Giboin. Clinically, I scrutinized my new Sorensen Sofa (above). At 7 feet long and 33 inches deep, the Restoration Hardware sofa should have been right for a narrow living room with 8.5-foot-high ceilings. “First of all, that is not a sofa, that’s a bench,” Ms. Loew said, after she looked up the Sorensen Sofa. Think about how a sofa will relate to other pieces in the room, she said. In other words, the actual height of a piece of furniture is perhaps less important than how its dimensions and proportions work together–both the seat and the arms should be at comfortable heights and complement each other. For instance, I have a pair of very small bergí¨re chairs (above) that my mother-in-law bought in the late 1960s. Now that he mentioned it, though, it was kind of light. It was like something out of Dickens: After being shown how bad the future could have been, I’d been offered a second chance to change the course of history. I already had a sofa in that other room–a Chester Tufted Upholstered Sofa (above) from West Elm that had been moved there some weeks earlier to make way for the Sorensen Sofa. Actually, the Chester Sofa was pretty low, too–just 29 inches high–and had looked very nice in the living room (above) before it got moved into the library. Together the three of us moved the sofas–and all the other furniture–around. The next day Stephanie and I went to the Oakland Museum’s White Elephant Sale Preview, where she found two small leather-topped side tables, 24 inches high, $60 for the pair. Flanked by the two smaller side tables, the Sorensen Sofa suddenly had stature. If you wonder why Michelle turned the dining room into a library in the first place, see The Death of the Dining Room.