About

About The Sofa Collection

A chronological reference on how sofas and chairs have been built, stuffed, covered and styled from antiquity to the present day.

The Sofa Collection is written and maintained by Forest Sofa Ltd of Salford, Greater Manchester, which has made upholstered furniture in the North West for more than fifty years and today trades as The Chesterfield Company and The English Sofa Company. The historical content is independent of those ranges: facts and object details are cited to museum and heritage collection records (the V&A, the National Trust, the British Museum, the Museum of the Home, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Collection Trust and university collections), and each period page lists its sources.

Where a historical form survives in a piece made today, we show the two side by side for comparison. Those links go to our own ranges and are marked as such. We do not sell anything on this site, and nothing pictured here from a museum collection is for sale.

Corrections are welcome: if a date, attribution or accession number is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and note the change on the page.