Okay. I love Jesus. But I really really like my couch.
My couch with home-made pillows
I have started trying to make decisions more carefully in terms of buying furniture over the past year or two. When my husband and I were starting out as a newly married couple all our extra money went into paying off student loans and our whole basement suite was a la Ikea. I’m not hating on Ikea–just note the Ikea rug in the picture of my couch–but the quality is only just so.
We lived with a rather frumpy couch, which was graciously donated to us, for the first three years of our marriage. Once I started taking decorating classes I knew that the first big purchase I wanted to make to change the look of our home was a new couch. I looked for months. I wanted to be able to choose the style and the fabric and to make custom changes if desired. I also wanted the quality and look to stand the test of time (and cats).
I love looking in antique shops and whilst rambling along Main Street in Vancouver I came across a store named Novo Furniture. Not only do they offer a large selection of customizable couches and other living room furniture, but their furniture is locally made and their prices beat similar stores like Sofa So Good. Some furniture stores can tend to be uppity and unfriendly towards people with strollers and children but the owner, David, was delightful and welcomed our family, toddler and all, warmly to his store. They had a great selection of stylish and moderately priced couches (worth saving up for) and hundreds of fabric samples to choose from.
It was great from a decorating perspective to be able to bring the fabric samples home and see how they looked throughout the day in different light. I love the clean classic lines of this couch and, as someone who likes throw pillows galore, the straight unfussy back. I had a great deal of fun scouring around fabric stores looking for the perfect fabrics to make pillows out of and the resulting happy and colourful throw cushions add to the warm fuzzies I feel towards my couch. It was a great way of putting into practice the pattern mixing skills I had recently learned in my Fabrics class (a post on Pattern Matching to come soon).
The couch is still going strong after over a year and much abuse. I would definitely shop there again, not that I’ll be needing a new couch any time soon. However, here are some other fantastic pieces of furniture they sell:
