Sofa Tables-Dress Up Your Living Room Furniture

Placing a sofa table behind your couch is a great way to provide display space and a little extra spot for setting a drink. A beautiful sofa table can also provide a great way to dress up the back of your sofa when you need to place it in the center of the room. A sofa spruced up with a sofa table behind it is a great way to break up a room, creating separate seating areas without the use of walls.

Sofa tables are available in any style to suit your home. Before you choose a table, consider how much of a focal point you want the table to make in your room. If your sofa table is going against a wall, hidden behind your sofa, or if you want the pieces displayed on the table to take center stage, consider a simple no fuss design, like a shaker style table. However, if your sofa table will be out in the middle of the room, you may want its details to be a focal point just as much as the items you display there. If that’s the case, consider the details of your table carefully. Sofa tables with turned wooden legs or those made from curved metal can lend style and grace to your room. Choose a table with a beautifully finished wooden top or an elegant glass or marble top to give your display items a beautiful place to rest.

If you need extra display space, or a nice little bookshelf, take a look at the sofa tables available that have a bottom shelf. It’s a great place to stash books or other art objects. Finally, don’t forget to look at sofa tables that include small drawers. These little drawers can be great for storing little items like candle snuffers and matches out of sight.

Sofa tables can enhance nearly any living room space. Not only do they provide a great place to display your most prized possessions, they offer function and finished look to your living room.

Jesse Akre

Sofa Tables – They Should Suit Your Lifestyle

The many different styles and varieties of furniture now available makes furniture shopping and home decorating so much more fun. It’s also much more challenging that it once was. Today when you choose furniture for your home, especially your living room, you want it to suit your lifestyle and the lifestyle of your family. The type of furniture you choose will tell a lot about you and your home. When your guests come to visit, you want them to feel welcome and comfortable. While your home should not be decorated merely for your guests, you still want an inviting home.

If you have plastic on your furniture, your guests probably won’t feel real comfortable sitting on it. If your sofa set is white, they probably won’t feel comfortable visiting with young children either. In addition, if your console tables are made of thin glass, they may be hesitant to rest anything on them. While you should always choose furniture that your and your family wants, these are some factors that should be considered when making your purchases.

As much fun as you have choosing furniture, the furniture manufacturers are having more fun with the many choices they now have for their designs. Modern furniture is very popular and is made with many different materials. Today almost anything goes as far as modern furniture. Home decorators are using sofas and sofa tables with a variety of materials including fabrics, wood, plastic, wrought iron and many more. Another very popular choice for sofas, console tables, dining room tables and beds is custom handmade furniture. More people today are choosing handmade furniture. This gives them the opportunity to not only have beautiful furniture but furniture made to suit them as well as their lifestyle.

Although picking out your furniture may seem difficult enough, placing it in your home may be even more difficult! Many people use the ancient Chinese method of Feng Shui. Feng Shui is based on energy or “chi”. The Chinese believe our energy must be able to flow freely in order for us to live a harmonious life. They also believe the location of our homes and furnishings is very important to the energy and harmony in our lives. Even simple items like dining room tables, beds or console tables need to be placed in an area where the energy (chi) can flow positively and freely.

Console tables with smooth rounded surfaces provide for great chi. Glass surfaces and mirrors are said to reflect energy to different parts of the house. Glass covered sofa tables with rounded edges placed in the right location in your home will bring positive energy to all that surround it. Do not allow your sofa tables, dining room tables or chairs to block doorways as this is said to promote negative energy.

There is such a large variety of console and sofa tables today that you should have no problem with harmony in your home. Red is a color that Feng Shui feel is inappropriate because this color represents fire.

If you’re uncertain about your furniture and the placement, there are magazines on home decorating as well as many websites that show entire living rooms complete with sofas, sofa tables, wall hangings, lighting and accessories.

Jesse Akre

Sofa Tables Are Rooted In Practicality

A common piece of accent furniture, the sofa table was once thought of as a necessity. The precursor of the modern coffee table, the development of the sofa table was tied to other significant changes in furniture design.

Following most of the design conventions of the time, sofa table began to appear around the seventeen hundreds. Sofas and settees were known for featuring a high, decorative back. As the design of the sofa changed and the back was lowered, the availability of space intrigued furniture designers and spawned changes in how the average living was laid out.

The hearth or fireplace was often the center and focus of a common room. Chairs and sofas were typically located very near the hearth. The purpose of course was to take advantage of the warmth of the fire and the light created. Contrary to what most of us do today, the sofa or settee was not placed up against a wall. Instead, the sofa piece was located in the center of the room or near the hearth.

A number of different tables were once considered sofa tables and were loosely defined as any table used near the sofa. The sofa table as we know it is found in the back of the sofa. Usually quite long and narrow in width, the modern sofa table serves as more of a decorative piece. Sofa tables come in many styles, from the contemporary to the baroque.

Thought to originate during the late seventeen and early eighteen hundreds, the design of the sofa table was very intentional. The upholstered sofa that we are familiar with today did not appear until the seventeen hundreds. Prior to that period, the settee was the standard. Characterized by an ornate wood frame, a settee would have upholstered seat and back, leaving the rest of the frame exposed. I have no doubt that the availability of cloth drove the trend towards the minimal use of upholstered surfaces.

Starting in the late eighteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution begin to pick up speed, fabrics weaving changed dramatically. Fabric weaving moved quickly from a cottage industry to mass production. As the cost for fabric dropped, new uses for it grew. It was during this period that the fully upholstered couch began to replace the settee. It is thought that the sofa table was designed specifically as an accompaniment to the upholstered sofa.

The Pembroke table best epitomizes the early history of the sofa table. Many table designs that we use today had their genesis in the Pembroke style. A drop leaf section was a characteristic of the Pembroke style and could be a single leaf or two. Another important feature distinguishes a Pembroke from other table designs. A Pembroke is known to feature a drawer and often will have two drawers. With the leaves in the down position, the table top takes on a rectangular shape. With the leaves in the up position, a Pembroke table top will be more or less a square.

The Pembroke served as a very practical piece of furniture and was far from merely a decorative table. The leaf design was combined with a center pedestal configuration which facilitated a comfortable seating position. The Pembroke could be stored against a wall, but the decorative look of the table often had it in the center of the room, or behind a sofa. Locating the table behind the sofa provided a location for a lamp or just somewhere to set your teacup.

Many modern sofa tables feature some aspect of the Pembroke including drawers and leaves. The leaves on a sofa table are usually found in the table ends, and do not run the length of the table.

Mike O’Brien

Sofa Tables – There’s Nothing Queer About Veneer

When it comes to materials used for sofa tables, veneer has received a bit of a bum rap over the years.

Often perceived as being inferior to solid wood, veneer has actually been around for thousands of years. In fact, pieces in King Tut’s tomb had exquisite veneer work in ebony and ivory. In the Renaissance, royal furnishings had lavish veneers, using rare and exotic species of wood known for their beautiful grains.

That’s one of the reasons why veneer is so popular today. The ability to match grains, create amazingly intricate designs such as sunbursts or detailed borders is something solid woods simply can’t duplicate.

Sofa tables lend themselves to veneers well. Many of the most beautiful woods in the world are not strong enough to become great looking furniture. They are either too soft, too fragile or lack the stability to build large pieces, such as sofa tables, for everyday use.

By using a veneer, craftsmen get the best of both worlds. They can choose a solid wood or plywood base for its strength and finish it with lovely veneer marquetry, borders and other flourishes that add to the design and value of sofa tables.

For those that aren’t familiar with veneer sofa tables, let’s start with the basics. First, veneer is wood. It is a thin layer of wood, for instance, maple, ash, rosewood or bamboo or any number of more exotic woods, such as Makassar ebony. On sofa tables, this layer can be as thin as 1/90 of an inch thick. That’s why it can be difficult to repair once it is damaged.

That’s not to say that sofa tables in your home aren’t durable if made with a veneer; quite the contrary. Thanks to modern manufacturing techniques, veneered sofa tables are as strong as or stronger than their solid wood counterparts. And they are far more beautiful for far less cost.

When looking for a veneered piece of furniture, you want to look closely at the veneer itself. If the piece has a design, look closely at the seams between the individual pieces of veneer. Are they tightly pieced together? Is the spacing consistent or are there gaps in certain parts of the design? Are the grains of the woods matched if they are supposed to be mirrored? Is the finish even over the entire piece? If you’re looking specifically at sofa tables, does the veneer look the same on the legs and on the top? Where they fit together, is the design consistent?

With these things in mind, shopping for one or more sofa tables for your home should be a snap. Just remember that veneered sofa tables can be as good if not better than solid wood pieces these days.

Ironically, Tutankhamen may have been onto something all those thousands of years ago. Veneers were popular because fine woods were rare and forests few and far between. Rather than making an entire piece of furniture from these rare woods, they used the veneers instead to add charm and beauty. One could say that the Egyptians were into being “green” long before the rest of us.

Jesse Akre

Sofa Tables – A Furnishing That Can Be Revived

Just because a piece of furniture is old doesn’t mean it has to be done away with. What may have been a pair of sofa tables that have given great service to the family are cast aside because they show signs of use. In some circles old pieces of furniture are actually prized, I believe they are called antiques. So, why follow the trend of tossing a piece out if it just has a few scratches or scuffs? Instead, why not give those sofa tables another life? It may not take as much as you think.

When starting this endeavor you should understand that the worst-case scenario is that you will have to refinish your old sofa tables to make them look new again. But the real solution may be much easier.

Start with a good cleaning. While you may begin this by dusting or using a damp cloth, eventually you need to work up to a real cleaning solution of part furniture cleaner and part water. As you go over the surface of the piece, look for any of blemishes and work on them. They will not all come off instantly, and some may need a little more attention. That is when you can pull out a piece of steel wool or a metal brush. Put solution on that as well and gently work on the marks that are more difficult. You don’t want to scrub so hard you go through the finish and start to scratch the furniture. Be patient. After a few scrubs, wipe the area dry and look over the work. Repeat as necessary to get all the dirt off the piece. If you have a very ornate piece of furniture, you may have a tough time getting into some of the decorative grooves. It’s time to get a new toothbrush, and use your old one as your new cleaning tool. The bristles of a toothbrush can often get into these tighter spots and help you break down that stubborn dirt. If there are areas in these decorative carvings that are not cleaning as you had hoped, you may need to get a toothpick or other similar small pointy item to flick the dirt out of the tight spots and then go over the area again with the toothbrush.

You may realize that as you are cleaning your sofa tables they are not as bad as you previously thought. Some of those marks and lines you thought were dents and cracks may really just be stains, pen marks, and other blights on the surface that made the piece look more worn than it really is. At this point you will need to carefully assess the sofa tables. Their problem may well have been a lack of cleaning and attention. If they look good enough to use now, put them back to work in your home. If not, you can still go to the next level, purchase a stripper, and strip the sofa tables down to their base woods and refinish them.

Jesse Akre

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