The Edwardian sofa: lighter rooms, matched suites and the return of show-wood

In brief. Between 1901 and 1914 the British sofa shed its Victorian weight: rooms were lightened, the deep-buttoned settee kept its place but gained loose cushions and loose covers, and slender show-wood settees in mahogany and satinwood revived the look of Sheraton and Adam. The matched set — a sofa and two armchairs in the same cover — became the ordinary drawing-room purchase, and “Chesterfield” settled into use as a plain word for a deep-seated, arm-and-back-level sofa. Alongside all this, Arts and Crafts furniture moved from the workshop to the shop floor through Heal’s and Liberty, and the war of 1914 closed the period with the founding, in 1915, of the Design and Industries Association.

The suite as a unit

1901–1910An Edwardian button-upholstered Chesterfield at Tyntesfield, covered to match its armchair

“Chesterfield” as a generic word

c. 1880–1910National Trust catalogues use it as an object type for sofas of these decades

Sheraton revival

c. 1910Mahogany with satinwood banding and ebony stringing, “in Sheraton style”

Arts and Crafts on sale

1897–1914Clissett chairs sold by Heal’s; Walton and Punnett chairs for Liberty; Heal at the 1914 Paris exhibition

Design and Industries Association

1915Founded by Brewer, Heal, Peach and Stabler after seeing the Werkbund at Cologne in 1914

What changed in the drawing room after 1901?

The Edwardian drawing room was, above all, less full. The Museum of the Home’s reconstruction of a townhouse parlour in 1878 shows the earlier taste — mint-green patterned wallpaper, red carpet, a red upholstered armchair draped with embroidery, a table under a heavy red cloth and a mantelpiece stacked with vases and framed pictures. The rooms of 1901–14 kept the bay windows and high ceilings but reduced the layers: fewer drapes, paler walls, more of the floor visible, and seating that stood on show-wood legs rather than hiding under fringe. The change was helped along by new services. At Dunham Massey in Cheshire the 9th Earl of Stamford modernised the house for his young family by installing electricity, central heating and the telephone, and from 1905 the architect Compton Hall and the furniture historian Percy Macquoid were commissioned to design what the National Trust calls its sumptuous Edwardian interiors. Electric light was still a luxury: the Science Museum notes that only six per cent of British homes had electricity in 1919, so for most families the Edwardian room was lit by gas or oil. Where it was electric, the whiter, steadier light showed dust and heavy colour without mercy, and pale chintzes, cane and polished mahogany suited it better than the plush and bobble-fringe of the 1870s.

It is worth being honest about who this applied to. The Museum of the Home’s tenement flat of 1913, furnished for the Delinsky family in the East End, holds a wooden dining table under a white cloth, two wooden chairs, a brass bed behind a curtain and a dresser of dishware. There is no sofa. The lighter drawing room described on this page belonged to the middle and upper classes; for a working family the upholstered three-piece suite was still a generation away.

Why do Edwardian settees look Georgian?

Because the trade had been reviving eighteenth-century design for a generation, and the Edwardians made it their own. The V&A bought a painted satinwood armchair from the liquidation sale of Wright & Mansfield in 1887 precisely to document high-quality reproduction furniture; the firm specialised in pieces based on the designs of Robert Adam, Thomas Chippendale, George Hepplewhite and Thomas Sheraton, and the museum observes that such furniture “evoked a background of established wealth and inherited furnishings”. That was exactly the effect a newly prosperous Edwardian household wanted. By 1910 the idiom was standard: a circular occasional table in the Museum of the Home, dated about 1910, is catalogued as “in Sheraton style”, its flame mahogany top cross-banded in satinwood with ebony stringing, on tapered legs with boxwood detail, spade feet and brass castors. The same vocabulary — mahogany show-wood, satinwood banding, boxwood or ebony line inlay, square tapered legs on spade feet or castors — ran across the drawing-room settees of the decade, whose upholstered seats and backs sat inside a slim visible frame instead of swallowing it.

Architects worked in the same key. Edwin Lutyens designed a set of twenty-one armchairs in 1905 for the board room of Country Life in Covent Garden, in ebonised and painted birch with horsehair upholstery, the oval back with radiating bars drawn from Hepplewhite. The other Georgian form the Edwardians adopted wholesale was the bergère: a chair or settee with caned sides and back and loose cushions. The type was Regency — a pair at Blickling of about 1810 have moulded mahogany frames, caned sides, brass castors and loose brown cotton sateen covers over soft-filled cushions — and Morris & Company were selling a close copy by 1893–95, designed by George Jack in mahogany and cane with two square-buttoned cushions in William Morris’s “Tulip” chintz. The V&A records that the chair was still in the firm’s catalogue in 1912. A cane bergère suite, three pieces in mahogany with loose cushions, was one of the characteristic purchases of the years before the war.

Did Arts and Crafts furniture survive into the 1900s?

It did, and it changed from a movement into a range. In the Cotswolds Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers, settled at Sapperton from 1893, kept to the ideals of visible construction, simple structures and limited decoration. Gimson had learned chairmaking in 1890 from Philip Clissett, a bodger of Bosbury in Herefordshire; his ladder-back armchair of 1892–1904 in the V&A is ash turned on a pole-lathe with riven ash splats and a rush seat, and after 1904 he stopped making chairs himself and left the work to his assistant Edward Gardiner. Ernest Barnsley’s wardrobe of 1902 came from the Daneway House workshops. C. F. A. Voysey, whose designs the V&A describes as deliberately simple and anticipating the “less is more” of modernism, designed twelve oak armchairs in about 1909 for the London offices of the Essex and Suffolk Equitable Insurance Company, with tall backs, leather seats on spring upholstery and a nailhead trim — a reminder that leather and springs belonged in the office as much as the club.

The shops did the rest. Ambrose Heal joined the family bedding business on Tottenham Court Road in 1893, won a silver medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 and became chairman in 1913; a Clissett-type ladder-back in turned ash with a rush seat, made for the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury in 1897–98, is catalogued by the V&A with Heal & Son as retailer. Liberty & Co commissioned independent designers and had the work made outside: George Walton’s “Lovat” armchair of 1899–1900 in walnut with a mother-of-pearl heart was made by William Birch of High Wycombe and retailed by Liberty, and an oak and walnut armchair of 1901 with rush panels and an ebony inlay, associated with E. G. Punnett at Birch, cost the maker £2 6s to produce — Arts and Crafts at a price a clerk could think about. The period closes with Heal’s own dining chair in walnut and mother-of-pearl, designed and made for the British Arts and Crafts exhibition at the Louvre in 1914.

When did “Chesterfield” become a generic word?

By the Edwardian years it was simply a type of sofa. The National Trust uses “Chesterfield” as a catalogue object type, and the dated examples run straight through the period: a mahogany and beech-framed Chesterfield of about 1880 at Mompesson House with scrolled arms and turned legs on brass castors; a button-back Chesterfield of about 1890 at Lanhydrock in red leather on ring-turned walnut feet; the Kingston Lacy Chesterfield of about 1900; and the Tyntesfield suite of 1901–10. In each case the word describes a deep, sprung, upholstered sofa with arms and back of much the same height, buttoned or plain, on short turned or square legs — not a maker, a place or a patent. The tradition that a Lord Chesterfield commissioned the first one cannot be verified on any museum record consulted for this site, and should be read as a story, not a fact. What the records do show is a sofa whose Edwardian versions were lighter in the leg, often in printed cotton rather than leather, and increasingly sold with loose cushions and a loose cover.

Materials: what went where, and why

Leather or fabric?

The Edwardians drew the line by room. Leather went where men smoked and where the public sat: Voysey’s insurance-office chairs of 1909 have leather seats on springs with nailhead trim, and the Lanhydrock Chesterfield of about 1890 is red leather on walnut. In the drawing room fabric won, and the fabric was increasingly printed cotton. Liberty sold “Chatsworth” in 1909, a design of fruiting and flowering trees by Sidney Mawson, hand block-printed by Turnbull & Stockdale in Lancashire and retailed under Liberty’s name; the V&A holds a run of the firm’s furnishing cottons of about 1910 — “Plumbago Trellis”, “The Beauly”, “Claremont”, “Field Flowers”, “Poppyland”. Such cloths were light enough to make loose covers, and loose covers are the Edwardian habit the records keep returning to: green cotton over the blue palmette at Tyntesfield, brown cotton sateen over the Blickling bergère cushions. A loose cover let the fixed upholstery be a good silk or damask and the everyday surface a washable print — and it let a family change the look of a suite for the price of the cloth.

How were Edwardian sofas sold?

Through shops that were becoming brands, and through the post. Heal & Son had traded on Tottenham Court Road for generations before Ambrose Heal turned it into a design house, and its new building of 1916, designed by his cousin Cecil Brewer, was the direct outcome of the Edwardian decade’s growth. Liberty’s method — commission the design, subcontract the making, sell under the shop’s name without crediting either — is documented across its V&A furniture and textiles. The V&A’s National Art Library holds the illustrated catalogue of Norman & Stacey of London, sixty-five pages of “artistic furniture, decorations, carpets and antique” of about 1910, and the Harrods catalogue of 1915, a volume of 1,448 pages with an edition for Buenos Aires: a customer in Surrey or Argentina could choose a suite from a page and have it delivered. At the very top, decoration was a professional job. Margaret Greville bought Polesden Lacey in February 1907, spent £80,000 on it, and employed Mewès and Davis, architects of the Ritz, with the decorators White, Allom & Co to make her a saloon in which, she said, she could entertain maharajas.

What ended the period?

The war, and a committee. In 1914 Cecil Brewer, Ambrose Heal, Harry Peach and Harold Stabler visited the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition at Cologne and came home convinced that Britain needed an equivalent body; in 1915 they founded the Design and Industries Association to stimulate high standards of design in industry through exhibitions, publications and educational pressure. Its early work grew out of Arts and Crafts but its direction was towards the factory, and it is the hinge between the Edwardian drawing room and the inter-war one. The sofas made after 1918 — Knole-type settees with loose cushions, Chesterfields in chintz, bergère suites — were the Edwardian forms continued, but they were made and sold by firms that had accepted the DIA’s premise that good design and machine production were not enemies.

What survives in a sofa made today

Five Edwardian ideas are still in production. The comparisons below pair each with a piece made in England today; neither maker offers a show-wood Sheraton-revival settee or a Knole, so in those cases the nearest form is shown and the difference explained.