settling on the settee

If I were allowed only one piece of furniture in my life apart from a bed, I would choose a settee. (A settee - not sofa - is what I grew up with - a long, plain, brown one covered in indestructible brown Dralon, perfect for four bouncy, combative children.)

[‘Lady on a Sofa’ (c1910) by Harold Gilman]

But it would have to be big, roomy, long, wide, deep, and very, very comfortable.

[Dove Cottage]

It first dawned on me properly that soft, squishy, un-puritanical settees and sofas were a relatively modern phenomenon when we visited Wordsworth’s cottage in the Lake District years ago. Even though I’d known from reading Thomas Hardy and George Eliot that for many people it was all hard wood and upright chairs in plain interiors, I couldn’t believe how uncomfortable it must have been sitting like that for a whole evening, never mind every evening. There was definitely no lounging or sprawling, unless you were William and Dorothy’s friend Thomas de Quincey and frequented opium dens, and even then the divans’ stuffing would have been lumpy, unyielding horsehair.

[‘A Chelsea Interior (The Carlyles At Home with their dog, ‘Nero’)’ (1857-8) by Robert Scott Tait]

So I have to admire the otherwise frugal Jane Carlyle and her single-minded dedication to her huge sofa at a time when this was unusual; distinguished and undistinguished visitors alike were invited ‘to share its softness and easiness with their hostess’, for whom it was also a refuge. It was six feet long, ‘padded and upholstered’ and in many ways appears to have been a substitute for her husband, the highly influential but very difficult Thomas Carlyle; she wrote to a friend that she had him in mind when choosing the sofa for ‘its vastness, its simple greatness’. It was certainly more reliably comfortable than her husband throughout their marriage.

[Sgt Pepper launch, Brian Epstein’s house]

Like Jane Carlyle, I find that low backs, wooden armrests, fancy rococo edges, settees that force you to perch politely are not for me. Brian Epstein’s antique version clearly brings out the worst in the Beatles who mess it up in anti-establishment rebellion.

No, I like a a settee I can flop onto and sink into, with an audible sigh of contentment.

[new quilt, old settee]

Which is just as well, because I’ve just bought one. After seven years of prevarication, because - difficult as this is for me to admit - I made a mistake with the previous choice. When we moved here we bought two very nice, modern-looking settees and had them covered in a lovely, stunning, bright pink wool fabric. And while I can’t really complain (and Simon doesn’t), they are a bit too modern, narrow, firm, 1950s G Plan-style, and the wool is too scratchy on bare arms and legs in the summer.

Now, though, I’ve found out just how transformational (as they say) a settee can be, how happy it can make you, especially when it is the HQ of your waking life. I love my new one, covered in soft-to-the-touch velvet in an nice but unremarkable shade of damson as, sadly, most high street retailers just don’t get meet a demand for cerise/emerald/lapis lazuli/sunflower settees.

[‘Jane Posing’ (1931) by Cathleen Mann]

It’s big enough to accommodate me at full stretch, but first I need to remove all my stuff, because, like the little Jane in the painting, I use the rest of it for my important things (work/knitting/books/laptop/phone/diary).

I think I’ve always been fascinated by settee choices. My second job after university was in export marketing for Arthur Sanderson & Sons in Uxbridge where they had the offices, factory, factory shop, and showroom. In today’s parlance, it had a toxic working culture, and I left after eight months.

[the discomfort of a narrow settee]

But not before I had acquired two very smart new settees upholstered in the latest Sanderson fabrics at ridiculously cheap prices. At the end of each season, the barely-used showroom furniture was sold off to employees, so we were able to replace our horrible dentists’ waiting-room leatherette settee rescued from somewhere for free (so narrow you could only just fit your bum on it). Later, we bought IKEA furniture which could be happily wrecked by the children, and then a gloriously huge, dark blue velvet settee on which they invented all sorts of mad games (I never understood ‘Scotland’s Hosts’, or even if it should have an apostrophe). The size was important - it had to be long enough to avoid broken noses during their face-planting competitions from a standing position on the armrest.

[Kettle’s Yard]

Length is taken to a wonderful extreme in the Kettle’s Yard house which has the longest white settee I’ve ever sat on; one time a friend and I must have spent a good hour on it, just talking and admiring the art and making the most of the permission to lounge in such a beautiful room.

[backstage, Astoria Cinema, Finsbury Park, 1963]

And I really do like to lounge. While I’d never keep my shoes on, I definitely do the same thing with my leg/s on the backs of settees. There’s a good IG account which considers the Beatles’ world in the Sixties, and Jim did a series on ‘Happiness is a Warm Bum’ in which he analysed the way they sat and the chairs they sat in. Needless to say, John Lennon emerges as the greatest sprawler/most comfortable-looking lounger. It amuses me that the upholstery fabric here is the kind of groovy thing the Beatles would later wear as clothes.

After our similarly extravagantly floral Sanderson settee, I’ve always preferred plain coverings. Instead, we brighten things up with quilts on the backs.

This week I settled on the settee in Brockley with a new baby and a new quilt. What a lovely new experience this is. Just sitting and being, and feeling the weight of a little grandson, listening to the breathing and snuffling, gazing adoringly into his deep blue eyes. His quilt is a smaller version of the wonky cross design I like so much at the moment,

and has one of my favourite Kaffe Fassett fabrics on the back.

I also made teeny tiny socks to go with it. Slightly too warm for August, but it had to be done.

Happy Sunday from the new settee!