Living room seating has changed gradually over the centuries. Words and language evolve just like furniture styles and designs. Throughout the centuries home furnishings have came a very long way from their beginnings and so has the verbiage we use to describe or name the furnishings. Here are a few that you may or may not remember:

SETTEE: The settee was sometimes an upholstered piece and sometimes more like a bench. It had low open arms, a high back and was twice the width of a chair. Almost all great designers of the 17^th and 18^th century, such as Thomas Sheraton, had one in their collections.

LOVE SEAT: An upholstered seat meant only for two, in some periods it was known as a courting chair. The size of a double chair or a miniature sofa it was first seen during the Queen Anne period and is still popular today as either supplemental seating with a living room set or as an option for small spaces.

DIVAN: From the Turkish culture this was a long, low, backless sofa that usually held a row of pillows placed against a wall. The divan originating out of the Turkish custom of piling up a high stack of rugs to use for seating or resting. This was popular as a sort of day bed.

CHESTERFIELD: The Chesterfield was an overstuffed couch or sofa whose ends were upholstered. The Chesterfield was supposedly named for the 19th-century Earl of Chesterfield. The use of the name Chesterfield to describe a sofa or couch is still popular in Canada.

DAVENPORT: The name Davenport is the name of a series of sofas manufactured by A.H. Davenport Company. Many people began calling all sofas a Davenport due to that brands popularity. Just like many words it was regionally used and most popular in the Midwestern United States and in Northern New York State.

SOFA: A long upholstered seat usually with stuffed back and arms. In 1625 the term came into use from Turkey. In Turkey it meant a “raised section of a floor, covered with carpets and cushions,” In Arabic suffah meant “bench.” By the early 1700’s it was in use in the English language to describe long seating for a living room.

COUCH: The word couch has been used for thousands of years but did not come to mean the seating in the living room until the last few centuries. In ancient Rome the couch was a grouping that would be arranged around a low table. Here men, not women, could recline to eat. By 1340 a couche was “a bed, lair,” from coucher “to lie down.” The traditional couch had the head end raised with only half a back. This was in comparison to a sofa that had both ends raised and a full back.

Tags: A.H. Davenport, amish couch, amish sofas, Chesterfield, davenport, davenport company, divan, LOVE SEAT, Sofas

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 12:12 am and is filed under Chairs, History of Furniture Making, Sofas, Upholstered Furniture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.