After Months of Searching — and One Bad Couch — I Finally Found My Dream Sofa

As a house and commerce author, I do lots (like, lots) of on-line purchasing, testing, and reviewing every day. I spend hours poring over buyer opinions, and I make professional and con lists, take Instagram polls, speak to family and friends, and attain out to inside designers to get each final morsel of details about the very best product in a given class. So you may guess I did the identical when it got here to purchasing a sofa, because it’s such a big buy. After weeks of researching, my fiancé and I lastly landed on what we thought could be the right couch: a moderately-priced, impartial modular sectional with a chaise lounge for stretching our legs out on. Because it turned out although, our search was removed from over.

It began with delivery delays (after all!), which left us sans couch for a great month in our new condo — comprehensible nonetheless. When the mannequin lastly arrived, it was lacking the legs we ordered and as an alternative got here with totally different legs within the incorrect amount, plus the chaise was nowhere to be discovered. This led to one other two months of backwards and forwards with customer support to get the correct components.

Within the meantime, we merely weren’t impressed with the sofa. It was stiff, shallow, and the material, which appeared beige on-line, was really white and liable to staining. To forestall our canine from leaving marks behind on the cushions, the couch sat lined in blankets more often than not. It simply wasn’t purposeful for our life-style, which fortunately revolves round hanging on the sofa along with our canine. By the point we lastly had the complete setup, we admitted defeat and resigned ourselves to a different arduous sofa search, which we absolutely anticipated costing us more cash and leading to extra frustration.

I often like to search out an eclectic mixture of classic and secondhand furnishings, however like anyplace else, you could find gems in an even bigger super-stock retailer when you hold your eyes open. With this in thoughts, I did some preliminary analysis on their web site earlier than heading to the showroom in Elizabeth, New Jersey (conveniently situated subsequent to an IKEA, a win-win!). We sat on a lot of totally different couches, however in the long run settled on the one I had noticed on-line: the Wilkinson couch.

I’ve loads of reward for this sofa, however what bought us above all else was the unimaginable depth and plushness of the seats. After months of feeling like we have been perched on a bit of cardboard in entrance of the TV, sinking into the showroom mannequin had us instantly “ooh-ing” and “ahh-ing” in anticipation of afternoon naps, cozy WFH days, and film nights. Apart from how completely comfortable it’s, the piece has a really traditional silhouette. That mentioned, it’s not definitively conventional or too trendy both, so it performs completely with the random mixture of types in the remainder of the condo. We have been then shocked to search out out that it got here with free white glove supply simply three days later, if we needed it.

After all of the delivery delays and intensely lengthy lead instances of 2020 and 2021, we have been giddy with pleasure over how shortly we’d be arrange with our model new sofa. Bonus: It additionally got here with 5 sofa pillows I’ve since recovered in pillowcases which can be extra my model, however they’re nice for adjusting the depth of the sofa (to take a seat farther again or nearer to the sting) to your liking.

Oh, and the entire buy got here in nicely underneath $2,000 (which is in regards to the value of what you’d often pay for DTC couches), and you may usually discover the Wilkinson on sale. Actually, you may take $340 off the same old value throughout Raymour & Flanigan’s Labor Day sale proper now, dropping the sofa all the way down to about $1,360.

Now, greater than a 12 months and a half later, we’re nonetheless on sofa — I imply cloud — 9 (sorry). The couch stays plush and stain-free, and it’s been by way of the wringer already (assume: canine accidents, espresso spills, and, sure, a melted chocolate bar debacle). Fortunately, it’s upholstered in heavy-duty efficiency cloth, and all of the cushion covers zip off for actually-easy laundering. I put them within the wash on a chilly, mild cycle then lay them out to dry, they usually’re often prepared to return on in lower than 24 hours.

When it comes to different upkeep, I’ve eliminated some capsules right here and there with a really helpful cloth shaver, and we flip and rotate the cushions each few weeks in order that they put on evenly. The Wilkinson suits two people and a sprawling French bulldog with room to spare, so we every have loads of area to look at TV, eat, and nap. We didn’t assume we’d be capable of discover a sofa we actually liked inside our funds, however typically you’ve simply gotta return to the fundamentals to search out the right piece.

Purchase: Raymour and Flanigan Wilkinson Couch, $1,359.95 (initially $1,699.95)