It’s time for a new sofa.

My current sofa, a stalwart IKEA Klippan has been with me through thick and thin; three different boyfriends and with four different covers. In sofa years it’s in late middle-age.

The lounge in our new home dictates the size we can buy, no bigger than our current one unfortunately, a two to two and a half seater. I’d love to be able to buy (and afford) a massive B&B Italia one but we’d never get down our pipsqueak hall.

We are asking a lot of our next sofa : it must be affordable, couple snuggly, super stylish, washable, have nice fabric, be delivered, be able to accommodate a tall man and either be midcentury modern or shabby French chic. Finally, it must have wheels, nice classic castor ones. We also flirted with the idea of it being a sofa bed for occasional guests, but that is asking too much of one piece of furniture!

[Gorgeous Picture by Lazybones Cafe on Flickr]

We plan to use our new sofa in two different ways (hence the wheels), either in front of the TV for snuggling down to watch BBC 4 (our current favourite channel) or against the rear wall of the lounge for parties or just when we want more space. Having the sofa at a prime TV viewing angle also means that our new Besta unit from IKEA is directly behind it and that looks messy to me, but we must go with the flow in appartmento piccolo. Wheels offer us a solution here.

M is tall and suffers a lot with our current sofa. It has a low back which offers no support to anyone taller than an eight year old and for the very tall causes neck and shoulder ache regularly. With a sad backward wave at all the low Italian sofas I start looking for a sofa plus one extra requirement - a high back. A high back that doesn’t compromise on my style aesthetic. Oh brother, where am I going to find one of those?

We’d like to be able to get a midcentury modern one secondhand (sans fleas please) and feel virtuous at our recycling thriftyness. How green! I’d then learn to / or enlist craft friends to help me recover it in a slubby 1950s/1960s eames fabric. However, all the times I’ve looked on eBay the size problem strikes again. That and not owning a car for the pick-up problem.

After a trawl through the internets and back copies of several home magazines I decide on a shape that seems to fit our style and height requirments:

Browning Sofa by Sofa Workshop

and the wheel type:

Unfortunately, they all seem over 2m long or cost more than £1500! Is thwarted

Last night I stumbled on sofa.com - bingo! M and I measured, checked and cogitated and we decided on their 2 seater ‘Jackson’ sofa.

Now all we have to decide is the colour. As it’s not exactly cheap we have to ‘future proof’ it against changes in our house and colour scheme.

So it’s either, ‘Heat and Dust’ (Grey), ‘Porcelain’ (Off-White) or ‘Taupe’ (You go figure):

What do you think?

All we need do after that is attach our perfect wheels…