Sofas And Their Development Through The Centuries

Sofas and their development through the centuries highlights a piece of furniture that has come to be thought of as completely indispensable to our modern day way of living. It's probably fairly certain that -- outside of a bed -- people spend more time on a sofa or a couch then most any other piece of furniture in a home. They provide much comfort and also much style in most cases.

These days, a sofa can come in a wide variety of fabrics, colors, coverings and shapes that people can suffer from information overload when it comes time to purchase one. Today's modern day sofa has its origins in the French word 'coucher, ' meaning to recline or take ease. Of course, the French being the French, called their version of a sofa a 'canape, ' which means something completely different in English.

Around about the year 1450 craftsmen in England had come up with a version of the sofa that they called a couch. The word 'sofa, ' in fact, did not yet exist in the English language. Of course, we tend to think of the words 'sofa' and 'couch' as being fairly interchangeable, though that was not always the case, though this was how the word 'couch' found its way into the English language.

Around about the 1600s, European elites began to become intrigued by the Orient and went on long journeys through the region. Those who traveled there and came into contact with Arabic speakers brought back the Arab-specific word for their version of the couch, which they called a 'suffah.' This word described a bench that reclined and was long in length. It was used to sit down and drink coffee on, for the most part.

This particular item of furniture had been around for literally millennia. Roman and Greek men in the ancient world used to take their ease on their own versions of suffahs, as a matter of fact. Women, however, were not allowed to recline or sit on sofas. For them, they had to make do with the Roman or Greek style of chair that was in vogue at the time.

Somewhere in the late 1500s, what we think of as the sofa today was created by craftsmen in Germany and England. Wooden frames were padded with various materials, including bird feathers or hair from a horse. These materials were favored by German craftsmen while English craftsmen preferred moss from the sea that was dried. Sofa seats and backs were wrapped and then a covering was put on.

For sofas of that era, the most common coverings consisted of silk, wool or velvet, and a sofa back then was very costly. This meant that only elites such as royalty or the very rich could pay for the cost of obtaining one. Soon enough, though, the Industrial Revolution began to bring sofa costs down enormously, to the point where the middle classes could begin to look at obtaining them.

Once that began to occur, the 1800s and 1900s saw sofas begin to take their place in the typical lower or middle class household. In fact, a sofa came to be associated with the family unit in a way that still seems to last to this day. For most, the piece of furniture they think of getting after they have bought a bed is the sofa.