You may have seen our previous blog post on our Design Your Own Sofa features. That article lays out how comprehensively you can control the size, shape, and look of your Sofa through a wealth of customization offers with our Modular Sofa systems.

One component of that was our Customizable Upholstery. What this means is once you’ve picked your Sofa, you then pick both the fabric and colour of the upholstery from literally hundreds of different combinations. Whatever you can picture in your head, whether it’s Orange Leather or a Warm Red Felt, we can make that happen.

But this applies not just to our Modular Sofas, i.e. Sofas that can be built in any shape and size according to your needs. Customizable upholstery is available in very nearly every single Sofa in our range. If you see a Sofa in our store or on our website, it is almost certain you can get it in any colour, colour combination, and fabric you could possibly want

What this blog post will focus on is the importance of this exciting decision, its impact, and the transformative interior design possibilities it enables.

This is just one small excerpt from our guide, showing a fraction of the Leather Upholstery options available for our Sofas. This sample may also give you an idea of how precisely we can match your ideal shade.

 

Your choice of fabric and colour will quite simply create a new Sofa, identical only to people who by coincidence or incredibly similar taste make the same decision out of hundreds of possibilities. A Sofa’s upholstery may be just skin deep, but the result is something that has an entirely different aesthetic effect.

For one thing, there’s a fundamental twin set of priorities in visual design when it comes to Sofas, two very, very broad types of impact furniture can go for on a visual level. On the one hand you see heavier use of curves, overt decoration, visual flair, and matt fabrics. This most strikingly creates a sense of warmth and cosiness, or of maturity and elegance depending on further details.

The second broad goalpost that can be aimed for is an impression of sleekness, something cutting and modern and bright, often but not necessarily made from more lustrous fabrics that catch the light. Designs aiming for this will often have a less busy design, aiming for smooth surfaces and a simpler, geometric shape. This makes a room feel bigger, brighter, more modern, and all round creates a clean and freeing sense of space. As far as upholstery goes, Leather is one of the defining fabrics that is often used for this.

See Below. The Rocco Corner Sofa on the left is more in line with the warmer, classic tradition, while the Paul Corner on the right embodies the more futuristic, brightening sensibility.

Both of these traditions make use of bright and dark colours, though some colours definitely on average have a warming effect versus a sleek effect. But what’s interesting is this isn’t an either/or situation. These two broad styles are as a rule intermixed, forming an interior design spectrum.

You’re not choosing one or the other, but the point is that being able to choose the upholstery from so many different options means that if something is catching your eye but just isn’t quite right, you have plenty of options. If you want something similar but warmer, or almost exactly like what you see but more bright and modern as opposed to warm and classic, choosing different upholstery is an easy, effective way of making the Sofa just right for you.

Let’s say you really liked the Evolve Modular Sofa, pictured below

Perhaps you like how modern it looks, the keen minimalist style of the design, and you know you want something very like it, but warmer to the eye. A bit more inviting, say, after just getting in from the cold in December, coming up to Christmas. But not too much, you still want the room feeling expansive, breezy, and cutting edge, especially in the Summer months. Well one thing you could do is opt not for a warmer, more inviting colour. Below you’ll see an Evolve configuration that went for a measured shade of blue, more soothing and likely to evoke relaxation at a glance, but not so dark it loses the Evolve’s strengths as a forward-looking, sharp design.

For something on the smaller side, but that’s another illustrative example, consider the Nessa Sofa Bed pictured below.

The Nessa Sofa is an interesting and pleasing middle ground. It has a decent amount of visual detail, a non-minimalist, substantial silhouette, but it doesn’t overload itself, and the Nessa is overall an elegant fusion, mostly modern in style and trending toward that clean geometric simplicity, but not nearly as trimmed down.

This makes the Nessa in particular a bit of a blank canvas. Making such a major decision as colour and fabric gives you an outstanding chance to define the Nessa’s exact identity. A Nessa in Dark Red Leather and a Nessa in pristine White Velvet or Orange Felt will all have highly unique strengths and visual draws, and at J&B we make sure that’s your decision and you get exactly the version you love most.

Take a look at this limited selection of swatches showing possible upholstery for the Nessa. Pick out a few different colours that catch your eye, and when you imagine a Nessa Sofa fully decked out in each of them it might clarify just how perfect you can make a J&B Sofa to your unique tastes, and just how fun the process can be.

And all this doesn’t even get into the more obvious point that customizable upholstery means you can get precisely what’s perfect for your home. There’s no reason to think twice about whether a J&B Sofa will clash with your Living Room’s existing interior design profile. With such a comprehensive choice of colours and fabrics, you can count on the fact that any Sofa you’re drawn to will not only match your home, but massively boost and reinforce its carefully cultivated aesthetic.

We of course encourage you to drop in and take a look around, or if you’re browsing our website and a stroke of inspiration makes you interested in the possibility of a certain Sofa in a certain colour, get in touch and we’d be delighted to talk about it.