Blogs

Sofa, couch, settee. Three words for the thing in your living room you sit on of an evening, and a surprising amount of quiet opinion about which one is correct. Some people have strong feelings; a settee is what your nan called it; a couch is what they say on American telly, and a sofa is what the shop calls it. So is there a real difference, o...

Your sofa quietly takes more punishment than almost anything else in the house. Daily sitting; the occasional spilled cuppa; crumbs; pets; feet; the lot. And yet most of us clean everything around it and leave the sofa itself until it looks visibly grubby, by which point the marks are much harder to shift. The good news is that keeping a sofa cl...

There's a particular feeling you get walking into a good hotel room: calm, uncluttered, quietly luxurious. Everything has its place, the bed looks impossibly inviting, and somehow it all just works. Then you come home to coats on the bannister and a coffee table you can't see. The reassuring truth is that hotel luxury is mostly technique, not bu...