How to keep your furniture looking great

We put our sofas through a lot. We sit on them nearly every day, eat meals on them, snuggle with the kids on them and sometimes even let our pets up on them. The bad news is that this will all take a toll on your shiny new sofa. The good news? We’re here to arm you with all the tips and tricks you’ll need to look after your furniture and keep it in great shape.

Keeping your sofa seat cushions plump.

If you sit in the same spot every day and never give your cushions a good plump, even the most resilient sofa cushions will start to look flat. Each Sofology sofa is exclusively designed for comfort, but seat cushion fillings vary from range to range to offer a level of comfort to suit everyone’s personal tastes. Read on to find out more about each type of seat filling and how to look after your sofa cushions.

Choose firm foam for lower maintenance…

This is the most common filling contained inside our sofas. High resilient foam seat inners offer low maintenance and great comfort and are found in many seat cushions across our ranges. They are also offered as an alternative in some models shown with fibre or Encore seating, so it’s always worth asking if you think you might prefer a sofa with this kind of filling.

Whilst being slightly firmer than fibre or Encore seats, foam interiors bounce back into shape much more easily than other types of seat fillings. A low maintenance option, they only require an occasional plump to encourage them to stay full, so they look great and feel comfortable.

Choose super soft fibre for ultimate comfort…

At the other end of the comfort spectrum, hollow fill blown fibre offers ultimate softness and cosy comfort. Much like the pillows or duvet on your bed, hollow fill fibre cushions are made from a cotton wool type material which is measured and filled by weight into your cushions. Each fibre is a hollow tube to help it to be resilient under use and to recover better.

The ideal choice for those who love to be cosy, this level of comfort goes hand in hand with a higher level of maintenance. Due to the nature of this soft filling, fibre seats can look quite lived in, as the interiors soften and flatten quite dramatically with normal use. If you want to prevent this, you’ll need to carry out daily maintenance – if carried out correctly, there’s no reason fibre seats can’t offer long life and lasting comfort for years to come.

Ideally, each cushion will need plumping after every use. As you sit on them, the fibres compress and begin to mat together. Leaving the seats like this overnight will allow them to settle, making it harder to revive them in the morning. Best practice is to give your sofa cushions a plump before you head to bed, encouraging the fibre to spread evenly throughout the cushion and then smoothing the fabric or leather to prevent loose sofa covers.

The best of both worlds…

As a clever and technically advanced way to offer the softness of fibre seats with more of the resilience and lower maintenance of foam, there are a growing range of hybrid seat interiors now becoming available. At Sofology, we have embraced these seat cushion interiors and are now offering them in a growing range of both fabric sofas and leather sofas. These hybrid interiors are offered as standard in some ranges and as an upgrade in others, as they are significantly more expensive than foam or fibre options.

One example used in many ranges is Encore. This clever seat filling takes the form of resilient foam, wrapped in a layer of super soft fibre. Combining the two elements in this way means you get an amazingly comfortable sit, with the foam core helping your cushions to hold their shape. Whilst not completely maintenance free, this solution offers a good alternative when you want the cosiness of fibre but don’t want to work as hard to look after your sofa cushions.

The finishing step…

Whichever type of sofa cushions you choose, once you’ve finished plumping them up, the final step is always to smooth out the fabric or leather to prevent loose sofa covers. There’s a simple method that we like to call the Union Jack method, as it follows the stripes of the Great British flag.

• Using clean, dry hands, begin by smoothing your cushions from the centre to the outside following a horizontal, and then a vertical line.
• Then, start at the centre again and smooth diagonally out to each corner. Smooth the fabric right to the edges and tuck down the sides and back.