optimized living

For some reason certain industries make it particularly for me to shop. By not providing standardized products it is almost impossible to judge the quality or the value of the product. Since quality is a big part of maximizing value/cost, it’s difficult to maximize. Furniture is notorious for this.

I spent the last two weekends getting familiar with sofas, leather in particular. We’ve been interested in buying a leather sofa for the last year or so, and with an upcoming move to a new home thought it was time to start looking. We spent some time browsing sofas in order to see what we liked and wanted. After looking at every leather sofa out there, we ended up deciding on a black leather sectional (L-shape) since it seemed to fit the room best. I always narrow my choices down to exactly what I want, then start looking for a good price and value.

We’ve found two stores so far that have a large selection of leather sofas. At the first, Bel-Red Furniture, there were several very nice Natuzzi sofas. Natuzzi seemed like a high-quality brand, and since we’re planning on keeping this sofa for at least 10 years, the best bet.

Second, we went to Hayek’s Leather Furniture in Lynwood. This is where we really learned about leather sofas. The sales guy (happened to be the owner/manager of the store), spent over an hour educating us on the qualities to look for in a leather sofa. Here is what I distills down to:

• Leather quality - Do not get split hide (lowest quality), but also be careful of extremely high quality leather as it is often difficult to care for.
• Cushion quality - Many sofas are built using interwoven strips of fabric to support the cushions. What you really want are springs instead.
• Removable covers - Make sure that the cushions, arms, etc. have zippers so that you can restuff portions if necessary over time.

In an L-shaped sofa there were a couple other things to pay attention to:

• If you are looking for a larger sectional (say 3 seats on each side and one middle seat), then the best way to get this type of configuration is to look for a sofa where the center section is independent of the two sides.
• The center section should be a curve instead of a square. This makes the center seat usable.

We were told that the Natuzzi brand is not necessarily known for its build quality. Whether that rules the brand out remains to be seen since we have not been able to get good information on the other brands. We’re still on a quest to figure out what brand and exact configuration that we want, but at least we have a little bit more information to make comparisions.