Before the sofa: couches, benches and the first fixed upholstery

In brief. Before 1700 there was no sofa in the modern sense: people reclined on wooden couches with loose cushions, then sat on benches and stools. Fixed upholstery — stuffing nailed permanently over a frame — first appears in England around 1620–30, and the Knole couch of c. 1635–40 is one of the earliest surviving upholstered couches. Seats were stuffed with feathers, grass or horsehair over webbing; there were no springs.

Earliest surviving furniture

c. 3000 BCEarly Dynastic Egypt; dry tombs preserved the wood

Fixed upholstery begins

c. 1620–30A feather cushion nailed to a London backstool

The Knole sofa

c. 1635–40Beech frame, crimson velvet, iron ratchets

Springs in the seat

NoneStuffing only, until the 19th century

The word “sofa”

c. 1700Arabic ṣuffa, via Romance languages

Couches before there were sofas

For most of history the ordinary person did not sit on anything upholstered. In Egypt, most people slept on mats laid on the ground, and a chair was reserved for someone in a higher position; furniture survives from the Early Dynastic period (around 3000 BC) and the New Kingdom (around 1550–1069 BC) only because the tombs were so dry. What survives shows how sophisticated the joinery already was. The chair made for Hatnefer, a woman of the court around 1490 BC, is boxwood, cypress and ebony, its joints cut as mortise and tenon and locked with pegs, its seat woven from linen cord — a construction still recognisable in a modern webbed seat. A bed from the tomb of Ramesses IX, three centuries later, stands on hardwood legs carved as bull’s legs, with gold-sheet cobras fixed by gold and silver nails and inlays of ebony; the British Museum notes that feline legs replaced bull legs as the fashion of the period.

The Greeks turned the couch into a social instrument. At the symposium, an aristocratic male drinking party, guests reclined one or two to a couch, and the room built for it — the andron — was laid out for seven to fifteen couches with cushions and low tables. The kline was a single bed set against the wall, each with its own small table and often a step stool; diners leant on the left elbow and ate with the right hand. Elaborate examples carried carved fittings: a Hellenistic couch-end in the British Museum, from 200–100 BC, keeps its ivory inset of a satyr’s head.

Rome inherited the habit and gave us the triclinium: a dining room with three broad couches, each seating three, arranged in a U. The couches were usually wood, but opulent versions had fittings of ivory and bronze, angled sharply upward to lift the diner above the table. A first- or second-century couch and footstool of wood, bone and glass in the Metropolitan Museum was reassembled from fragments, possibly from the residence of the emperor Lucius Verus; bronze headrest fittings from Campania, dated AD 20–60, are inlaid with silver and copper and finished with mule heads and satyr busts. Unlike Greece, respectable Roman women were permitted to recline with the men. The reclining habit lasted in the West into the sixth century — and then, for a thousand years, it stopped.

Benches, forms and the loose cushion, 1100–1600

Medieval and Tudor England sat on stools, benches and forms. The V&A’s furniture curators describe the two common builds: a staked stool, made by boring holes into a solid plank seat and wedging the legs into them, and a boarded stool of straight boards pegged and braced together. A form was a long armless bench, free-standing or fixed to the wall, sometimes with a back panel; an English example of 1500–50 survives in the museum. A French bench of the late fifteenth century, the banc tournis, had a movable back rail that pivoted over so its sitters could face either the fire or the room — arguably the first convertible seat.

Comfort came from textiles laid on top, not built in. Even a great household usually had one armchair, for its most important person, while everyone else sat lower on stools, benches or cushions. Thrones could be dressed with luxury textiles, but as the V&A puts it they were for looking important, not lounging. A French armchair of about 1515 in the same collection includes a storage box within the seat — the chest-as-seat that would persist in the settle for centuries. The folding X-frame chair, seen in an Italian example of about 1550, descends directly from the campaign stools of Roman generals. As late as 1630, the Museum of the Home’s reconstruction of a hall shows the household still eating together at an oak table on stools.

The birth of fixed upholstery, 1600–1650

The change that makes a sofa possible is small and easy to miss. Some time around 1620–30 a London chair-maker took a fully formed cushion — a ticking case filled with feathers — and nailed it down to the frame of a backstool. The V&A holds that chair and describes it as the beginning of the practice of fixed upholstery. The backstool itself had evolved by adding a back to a stool; it was made in sets, on walnut and beech frames with pegged mortise-and-tenon joints, finished with decorative brass nails over structural iron ones. Between about 1615 and 1670 it was by far the commonest type of relatively comfortable chair in England; “back stool” was the period’s own name for it, and the collectors’ term “farthingale chair” came later.

The trade that did this work was the upholder — the word survives in the Furniture History Society’s dictionary of British makers, and the V&A catalogues the chair made for Bishop Juxon in 1661 under the upholsterer John Casbert. For royal furniture the orders came through the Great Wardrobe, the department that supplied the court, and it is through that route that the most famous early sofa in Britain reached the house where it still sits.

Leather, cane and the first settees, 1650–1700

By the Restoration the method had settled. The V&A’s leather backstools of 1640–60 and 1660–1700 show the standard build: webbing and a base cloth nailed to the frame, a padding of grass or horsehair — sometimes stitched through to keep it from forming lumps — and a top cover of leather nailed around the seat rails. There are no springs; there would be none for another century and a half. Leather was the cover for use rather than display, on a chair that would withstand regular sitting, possibly at the dining table.

Fashion moved in two directions at once. At the top, walnut and silk: a day-bed at Knole of about 1670–85 has eight scroll legs and a cover of silk brocade shot with silver thread. Below it, cane. From the 1680s caned chairs became extremely popular because they were much cheaper than upholstered ones; a caned walnut day-bed of 1680–1700 in the V&A was used with a loose squab cushion, and the Museum of the Home records the cane chair as the most common chair in middle-class homes from the 1690s to the 1720s. The loose squab over a resilient base is an idea the sofa never abandoned.

The decade also produced the earliest settee in the V&A’s collection with its upholstery never removed: a piece of 1690–1700 made for Thomas, Lord Coningsby, of Hampton Court in Herefordshire. Its beech frame stands on ebonised walnut legs turned as fluted columns and joined by curving cross-stretchers; its cover is wool-and-silk canvaswork with a back of harrateen, trimmed with braid and bell fringe. It is a chair that has become long enough for two — which is, in the end, the whole definition.

And the name arrived. Sofa is an Arabic loan-word (ṣuffa, a raised platform with cushions) that made its way into English through the Romance languages; the National Trust places its first English use around 1700, the same decade in which the Knole couch came to Kent.

Materials: what went where, and why

Leather or fabric?

The choice was already the one we make today, for the same reasons. Leather meant use: the V&A describes its leather backstool as made for use rather than display, tough enough for regular sitting. Turkey work — a knotted-and-cut wool pile made in England in imitation of Turkish carpets — was sold as matching sets of chair covers, a hard-wearing middle option; a backstool cover dated 1649 survives in the V&A, and the Royal Collection holds a chair in the same material. Velvet, silk and metal thread were for royal and state furniture, supplied through the Great Wardrobe to display the wealth and status of the owner — so much so that Hardwick’s oak couch was simply painted red to look like velvet. Cane was the cheap and light answer, softened by a loose cushion. Only the horsehair-over-webbing seat, nailed and studded, cut across all of them.

What survives in a sofa made today

Six ideas from before 1700 are still in production. The comparisons below pair each with a piece made in England today; they are there to make the lineage visible, not to suggest the modern pieces are reproductions.