Is this an insane price for a leather sofa bench

[onlychildhamster]

I am fantasy shopping a little, I only own cheap furniture (ikea/muji/made- maybe not mega cheap but definitely not ££££) so I probably could not bring myself to spend this!

www.curiosityinteriors.co.uk/dining-furniture-c3/dining-chairs-benches-c23/bianco-leather-harris-tweed-dining-bench-p3769

My set up in my reception room is that we never had a sofa, we have a sofa dining bench and a Muji Dining table and chairs. We currently have this. My DH likes leather sofas but not the really bulky ones (which is why we opted for sofa benches which are slimmer). We think we have space for the 160cm 3 seater and the existing sofa bench would just be on the other side. We only have two extra chairs and those are usually tucked in on the left and right side of the table.

www.made.com/ppc/flynn-dining-bench-graphite-grey?utm_content=shopping-prospecting&madelp=gshopping&gclid=Cj0KCQiAieWOBhCYARIsANcOw0wG4wnUuFcYPYDqlGbaHPIrdxK3xIyBX6YIdtzr1s3h4uxqHglj75kaAhZVEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

It seems crazy expensive to me, but then it is full leather... I hate PU leather! I don't need everything to be matchy matchy so it doesn't bother me having two different benches.

www.notonthehighstreet.com/theorchardfurniture/product/vintage-leather-curved-arm-sofa-bench-choice-of-sizes

What do you all think?

Leather benches can be quite unforgiving to sit on unless the leather is soft and they’ve been correctly stuffed. If you’re spending what sounds like a significant amount of money to you on something which you want for comfort because you have no sofa, I’d advise buying from somewhere where you can sit on it first.

@ComtesseDeSpair DH only wants leather. His exact words' I want it to be like the seats in parliament, but brown and not green'.

we already have the fabric sofa bench which is quite soft so doesn't make sense to get something identical! I don't really need it for comfort per se; i mean as i am typing, DH is watching succession on the projector (on the dining table) while on the sofa bench. We just want 2 sofa benches on either side of the table which means we can potentially squeeze in more dinner party guests in a way that a regular 3 seater sofa + chair combo wouldn't. Not that I have dinner parties, but we often invite people to eat and DH has 3 siblings!

@ComtesseDeSpair we have this but in black.

go.skimresources.com/?id=470X756&isjs=1&jv=15.2.1-stackpath&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mumsnet.com%2FTalk%2Fproperty%2F4448565-Is-this-an-insane-price-for-a-leather-sofa-bench%3Fwatched%3D1%26msgid%3D114090710%23114090710&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.made.com%2Fppc%2Fflynn-dining-bench-graphite-grey%3Futm_content%3Dshopping-prospecting%26madelp%3Dgshopping%26gclid%3DCj0KCQiAieWOBhCYARIsANcOw0wG4wnUuFcYPYDqlGbaHPIrdxK3xIyBX6YIdtzr1s3h4uxqHglj75kaAhZVEALw_wcB%26gclsrc%3Daw.ds&xs=1&xtz=0&xuuid=a35de788d263943a6aace002153bf146&abp=1&xjsf=other_click__auxclick%20%5B2%5D

@ComtesseDeSpair

Leather benches can be quite unforgiving to sit on unless the leather is soft and they’ve been correctly stuffed. If you’re spending what sounds like a significant amount of money to you on something which you want for comfort because you have no sofa, I’d advise buying from somewhere where you can sit on it first.

This is sensible.

Don’t you have space for an actual sofa? I can’t imagine sitting at a dining table all the time

@LittleBearPad all the other flats in my block have sofas! They also don't have such big desks for home working, there was this guy who had a computer monitor propped up on 1 side of the bay window! DH has no interest in sofas, his childhood home only has a sofa bed from futon company. Jewish households tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time around the dining table anyway, its just the way things are. I have never been invited to a living room for shabbat dinner and shabbat dinner usually go on late into the night i.e. 11 pm isn't that unusual. Passover can end at 4 am the next day.

I actually find it much easier to sit at a dining table while watching stuff. You can have lots of canapes, eat a full meal with multiple dishes (3-4).

@LittleBearPad i know a lady with 2 adult DDs and who lives in a 3 bedroom maisonette. She just has one v large dining table that seems to be able to sit 10 in her reception along with bookshelves for hundreds of books.I guess its essential for her as i imagine its quite a regular occurrence to have 10 guests over every friday night and its meant to be a formal sit down meal.

I don't have a TV, a car (i live in london though), a TV license, a sofa or even my own closet (i share a 100 cm closet with DH and also have underbed storage). But at the same time, I couldn't live without my desk (I will never be the kind of person who can work at the dinner table even if I only needed my laptop) or my dressing table (I wear makeup everyday and standing at the bathroom for 15 minutes everyday is too tiring). I guess everyone's lifestyle is different!

@LittleBearPad also how much TV do you all watch? My DH is on a binge watching phase now so i guess its a lot (but most of it is on the laptop), but normally, we don't watch more than 1 hour a day which coincides with dinner. When dinner ends, we stop watching and generally use the laptop. I only buy kindle books nowadays so i have kindle online or my actual kindle. DH has the economist subscription (but tends to read this on the loo!). And he uses his laptop loads too.

Mumsnet takes up way more of my time than telly and Mumsnet is best done on a laptop on my desk! I type way faster on my laptop than on my phone.

I think that is really cheap.

Ok 😮

Rather more TV and curling up on sofas and less eating in this house.

@LittleBearpad Wow. I just read that the average British person spends 5 hours and 40 minutes a day watching tv/video content, up from 4 hours. OK that makes a lot of sense! www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/05/britons-spent-third-of-time-watching-tv-and-online-videos-in-2020

If i was sitting in front of the TV for one third of my waking hours (assuming 6-8 hours of shut eye), I would probably want a huge comfy sofa too... But today I watched netflix/nowtv for an hour, half of a v bad movie and snippets of DH's series before getting bored...And DH was eating dinner during most of it...

Curious as I don't have any DC yet, do children watch as much? my parents were very anti -tv when i was a kid, and DH's mum banned it! haha.I remember crying as a 8 year old cos my dad cancelled the disney channel/all the other cable channels except bloomberg to prevent me from watching it! I was only allowed television for an hour daily as a teenager and even then my parents made sure i studied during the commercial breaks

@LittleBearPad just realized lol that Made is styling my current dining bench as a sofa! Or part of a sofa set up! Guess it's all semantics whether it's a sofa or a dining bench! In the past, it was always styled as a dining bench

Lol was talking to my MIL on this as I was surprised people thought sofas are so essential...she is the chief visitor to my flat and she said but I thought you had a sofa?! Basically to her, my sofa bench isn't any different to any sofa! Even though it's not big and squashy!

Well, it’s all about personal preference, isn’t it OP. For some people, not having a sofa to relax, slouch or snuggle on as they read their book or watch something on their tablet wouldn’t work for them. I couldn’t stand to sit for long under the garish lighting from all those badly positioned spotlights you have in the room your dining table is in, but they obviously work for you. If you don’t need a sofa, don’t have one, the bench seems to be a good solution for the purpose you need it for - but a sofa is a pretty commonplace piece of household furniture so your surprise that most people seem to have one is a bit baffling.

I was expecting something that cost £25k and I was all ready to agree with you. I don't think £500 is bad at all.

@ComtesseDeSpair lol the spotlights aren't me! The seller was an ex BTL landlord and spruced it up for sale. I was just grateful to get a 2 bedroom flat for £392k in zone 3 London that didn't have major problems. Even then what I really wanted was a 3 bed flat for home office + nursery but I couldn't get one for that price in my favoured location plus I really wanted to qualify for FTB stamp duty exemption so even if I had more money, a 3 bed flat is way more than 500k anyway...So our priority for the past 2 years has been overpaying at least £1000 every month rather than changing everything.

And when I was looking at furnishing my flat, I was looking at interiors videos like this where the people had bean bags instead of sofas. This is my DH's dream to live like that but unfortunately I think he is too tall!

@stingofthebutterfly it's over a thousand for the three seater...

Well, in summary, £1,000 plus is really pretty cheap for a piece of furniture you’re planning to use for several hours a day every day. I have a £5,000 chair that I never even sit in, simply because it looks good in the corner. We should all furnish our homes according to our priorities. As I said upthread, I wouldn’t recommend buying a leather bench you haven’t had the chance to sit in, because leather can be unforgiving unless the ergonomics of the piece and the stuffing have been done well, so I wouldn’t buy the one you linked to because at that price (quite cheap) it probably isn’t great. I’d go to a few independent furniture stores, of which there are many in London, and do some testing.

My mind is blown by not having a sofa but I am the ultimate in lazy when I am at home. I can’t sit for any length of time without my feet up on the sofa🤣

In fact at home, I nearly always sit with my feet up.

It’s fascinating how differently we all live our lives.

I do think the sofa bench looks very nice. Seems a bit odd to all be sat next to each other though, if you aren’t putting your feet up on it, is it not better to have separate chairs with arms?

@DontKeepTheFaith you can snuggle on a sofa bench, squeeze more people on it (important as my DH has 3 sisters!). It does have the 'feel of a sofa' but also allows you to eat full meals, even messy stuff like steamboat while watching Netflix. impossible to do that with a coffee table! It's like Integrated living/dining space.

I do sit with my legs up on my sofa bench...and so does my DH haha.

@ComtesseDeSpair thanks for the advice. Yes I agree with what you said. DH said it should be more like £3-4000. I think I have been conditioned by IKEA/made/muji to believe furniture is that cheap! Which it obviously isn't.

How do you put your feet up on the bench? What do you lean back on? (Sorry intrigued!). Don't you also want to curl up somewhere comfy to read?

Also eating and watching Netflix - Nooooo! Eating is for enjoying the food and chatting with family, not staring at a screen!

@titchy I sit cross legged haha. I read on a kindle fire so tend to read in bed. If I only watched Netflix while not eating, I might as well cancel it cos I wouldn't have any time otherwise! Even with my orthodox mil, we would talk for hours but then we would occasionally watch something together (not very often because it's rare for us to find something we both like!)

@titchy if you wanted maximum comfort, wouldn't you watch tv in bed? I used to watch tv in bed as a child and it was very handy to be able to dive under the covers when I got scared (which is often lol). My family had a cinema room with a big screen,a full multimedia system and yes a sofa but it became a bit of a white elephant as we realized that we preferred watching tv and movies in bed (and my dad bought a dvd player). The cinema room was also a dark room so I preferred watching in my parents' bedroom as a teen as I could tell my parents I was studying during the commercial breaks (i worked on a small kids table in my parents' room). I always think if i was a telly person, I would get a TV bed.