Tuesday, 29 October 2013

Is It Just A Fad To Buy Designer Sofas?

By Cara Stone


When it comes to furnishing our family area, the couch occupies pride of place among other items of furnishings since the most significant and certainly most desired item of furnishings. However, if you are shopping for a sofa this season, you may notice that many more of us are now moving towards the high-class end of the consumer market. Infact, high end sofas are so popular that they are quickly becoming commonplace in the homes and apartments of many. So does this trend mark a real change in preferences or are we just buying in to a current fad?

Arguably, the ultimate way to deal with this query would be to look at the background of modern home furniture which goes back towards the European Renaissance era. During this time period, human comfort became a driving factor when choosing furniture for the first time, leading manufacturers to add armrests to conventional home benches. As a newfound taste for home luxury developed, designers started to upholster home furniture the very first time, covering layers of horsehair padding around wooden frames in a manner that closely resembles the modern production process. As trade and economic developed continued, sofas swiftly become popular among the ruling classes.

Infact, it wasn't until the industrial wave that sofas actually became a mass-market proposal, as European industrialists formulated mass-production strategies which substantially lessened the unit manufacturing expenditures of sofas for the public. Even looking back just over recent years, it wasn't until the onset of globalisation that sofa manufacturers could actually keep costs down to some bare minimum by outsourcing production to lower cost nations like China and India. Prior to this time, sofas staying generally the preserve of the middle and upper classes who could afford to significantly invest in property and home design.

You could dispute then; that the idea of a luxury sofa is itself rather incongruous when you consider that sofas have been considered a luxury until very recently in the grand scheme of things. Nonetheless it still begs the question as to the reasons the modern consumer is quite willing to spend more for a product which, for all intents and reasons, can be purchased at a fraction of the price without a decrease in quality. This is actually the core of the matter and goes a great to outlining why the trend toward high-class sofas is here now to stay.

So in summary the thought of a high-class sofas is a thing of a misnomer taking into consideration the history of the sofa as a high-class item. However the discernable movement towards luxury end of the sector implies that more and more of us are going to invest our home dcor and putting value on original design rather than merely thinking of a sofa as a functional object alone. With the sofa now a standard household item, it appears wholly reasonable that luxury sofas continuously increase in popularity as more and more of us aim to invest in our home furnishings.




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