How To Choose A Sofa If You're Not Victoria Beckham

As mentioned in this post, I'm looking for a new sofa for the living room. I tried various places including M&S and John Lewis, but it just doesn't seem sensible to spend upwards of £1k on a sofa that's going to have Jack Russells sleeping on it and a jam sandwich-wielding toddler jumping up and down on it. We need something that looks like it cost a lot, but actually cost not very much at all.

So I had a look on eBay to see if I could find anything second-hand, perhaps in need of re-upholstering. Good god, there are a lot of ugly sofas out there. There are also some hopeful people selling antique sofas for £10k, offered with collection only. From Poland. Seriously, you're selling a sofa for £10k and you won't ship it? That's just lazy.

Anyway, I didn't find anything local, but I did spot an advert for a company called Made.com, who turn out to sell awesome contemporary sofas (and other furniture) by British designers at very reasonable prices. Here are our favourite options:

I really like the lime sofa, but it's quite a commitment, isn't it? Unless of course you're Posh Spice, who can in all likelihood afford to buy a few dozen lime sofas and then toss them out a week later when she gets bored - but a normal person would probably want a sofa to last a good few years and I'll surely want to change up the living room decor by then.

So, neutral it is. When living with dogs and toddlers, I recommend as many brown furnishings as you can stand to hide the general muck and smears of Marmite. Fortunately we both like brown so that's no problem. I took a photo of our existing sofa (a ridiculously deep, squashy, comfortable neutral number that we've had for years) and PhotoShopped each of the Made.com sofas against it, along with some of our existing furnishings, to see what looked good.

Sources: Chandelier (ours), Fielding sofa, Chest of drawers, Driftwood side table, Sofa (ours), Flooring.

The Fielding sofa emerged as a clear winner - the boxy retro shape contrasts nicely with our squashy sofa, and although the fabric appears to be quite light, closer examination reveals that it's a sturdy herringbone with a brown zigzag pattern that I know from years of experience will hide dirty paw prints very nicely.

I'm going to keep looking around for now, but it's certainly looking like a great option.