Anecdotes
including Haunted, Gogglebox and Sofa Sunday
the real-life design reader
Issue 1/6 – Couch
In the launch issue of Dirty Furniture, we’ve gone under the cushions to find you the richest dirt the couch has to offer.
Summer 2014
£11 + postage
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Manufacturing
Pffff Tssss
What’s in the making? Dirty Furniture’s Anna Bates encounters the sofa as the most stubborn object in the design industry.
Advertising
A Perfect Mess
Why is the sight of an untidy living room so seductive? Design magazine editor and frequenter of the furniture fair circuit Johanna Agerman Ross considers the current vogue for mess.
Designers
Designers and their Couches
Do designers take their work home with them? Five practitioners tell Dirty Furniture about the couch they designed and reveal the one they live with.
TV
The Couch and the Sitcom
One of the most formulaic of television of genres, the situation comedy is anchored around the sofa. Architect Sam Jacob tunes in. Read article
Materials
Watching Foam Rise
Trying to get to the bottom of this most ubiquitous of materials, technology writer Joanne McNeil falls headfirst into a vat of chemical uncertainty and irresistible click-throughs.
Interview
An Upholsterer
‘Kids at school now don’t know what upholstery is; no one under 40 has done it.’
Art
Taking it Lying Down
The female in repose is one of the most enduring tropes of visual culture. Natalie Ferris wonders whether this figure is sustained or betrayed by what props her up.
Interview
A Couchsurfer
‘I am 6ft tall and the couch was about 4ft long with a spring sticking out of it.’
Photoessay
Unsettled Settees
For most of us the couch provides an opportunity to vacate our minds and zone out. But the following artists and designers have other intentions for the archetype: these sofas demand you switch on.
Fiction
Domestic Safari
In the process of dismembering abandoned sofas for his artwork midwestern American artist Bryan Christiansen discovered the following objects lurking under the cushions. Tom Harrad speculates on the catch.
Interview
An Antique Dealer
‘People buy their minimalist sofa and then they build an igloo on it to slot themselves into.’
Politics
Will the Honourable Gentleman Please Sit Down?
Usually considered a site of arch inactivity, the sofa has become one of modern Britain’s political battlegrounds. Will Wiles explores the surprisingly fraught symbolism of lounge furniture. Read article
History
The History of Comfort
The concept of ‘comfort’ – a positive relationship between your body and its physical surroundings – is relatively young. Far from being a given, it was something that was taught, learned and eventually marketed. Historian Penny Sparke traces the role the sofa played in this tutelage.
Psychoanalysis
Material for Interpretation
Artist Jeremy Millar stands witness to the unstitching of Sigmund Freud’s couch.
