Tips on buying living room furniture?

In the upholstered area, I think you have two types of opportunities today. You have what they call a stack type of thing, which is what you see on the floors; and what you are going to take home or the custom ordered business. If you are shopping for custom ordered items, which are what we do, I would look at the pattern and fabric. Does it match? There is a non-matched pattern, which is basically some type of a little tweed that doesn't have to be matched from cushion to cushion. If you are going to look at upholstered furniture with a pattern on it, does the pattern match on the skirt? The front frame? The seats? The back? The arms? That's going to indicate if the manufacturer paid a lot of attention to detail, cutting, and sewing, just like a skirt. If you get a skirt that's a dress with a top and a bottom, you know what stripes are not aligned. So that is the first thing that I would look at. The second thing that I would look at is what the cushions are constructed of. You could have down feather, you could have foam. Is the foam or whatever is inside the cushions, is it wrapped with some type of barrier between the fabric and the cushion core it self? The reason that you want to bury your barriers is that the fabric then will attack the integrity of the cushion over time. That's when you get a cushion that will look like a pancake and the fabric is sort of baggy like your trousers. That's the thing that wears out in a sofa. You should be as a consumer, and when you look at a sofa, pull that cushion out and unzip it. Look inside to see what is in the cushion. A salesperson should be willing and able to tell someone, "Hey, this cushion is a 3 point density foam." That should be something that the consumer should want to know.