Made to order
Choosing your fabric
70 fabrics across 6 collections, and every one of them the same price. So this is a decision about light, wear and what you want the room to feel like — not about budget.
Every sofa we make to order can be built in any fabric on this page. There are no grades and no upgrade prices — a crushed velvet costs exactly what a chenille costs, which is unusual enough to be worth saying twice. It also means the only thing left to decide is which one you actually want to live with.
Tap any swatch to have it posted to you. 3 samples, free, anywhere on the UK mainland.
Start here
Most people arrive at this page trying to choose a colour and leave having chosen a texture, because texture is what decides how a sofa looks at four in the afternoon in a real room. Three questions get you most of the way.
How much light does the room get?
A pile fabric — the velvets, and Marble — does something to light that a flat weave does not: it reflects differently depending on which way the pile lies, so the same cushion reads as two shades from two ends of the room. In a bright room that is the whole appeal. In a dark north-facing room it mostly disappears, and you have paid in upkeep for an effect nobody can see. Dark rooms are where the flat weaves earn their place.
What is going to happen to it?
A broken surface hides things and a flat one shows them. That is the single most useful rule on this page. Chenille and Marble have irregular surfaces and swallow crumbs, dust and light wear; Naple is flat and even and shows every one of them. It is not about durability — it is about what you will be looking at on a Tuesday.
Should the sofa be the quiet thing or the loud thing?
In a room that already has pattern — a rug, wallpaper, a lot of art — a plain matte weave lets everything else be seen. In a plain room, a crushed velvet or a Marble is the thing that stops it reading as unfinished. Two good fabrics can both be wrong in the same room.
Every fabric here costs the same. Nobody is steering you towards the expensive one, because there isn't one.
Chenille
12 colours. Chenille is woven from a yarn that has short fibres bound into its core, which leaves the surface soft and slightly broken rather than smooth. Look closely at any of the swatches below and you can see it: a fine, nubbly texture flecked with lighter and darker threads of the same colour.
That flecking is the practical argument for it. A surface that is already visually busy does not show the small stuff — crumbs, dust, the faint sheen a sofa arm picks up over a year. It is the most forgiving fabric here for a room that gets used properly, and it is warm and soft to sit on, which the flat weaves are not.
The trade is that the pile flattens where you always sit. It is not damage and it is not permanent; a soft brush lifts it back. But it does need the brush.
Plush Soft Velvet
17 colours — the largest collection we offer. A short, dense, even pile. Colour on a plush velvet reads deeper and more saturated than the same colour on a flat weave, because the pile traps light instead of bouncing it straight back. It is the fabric that makes a sofa look like it cost more than it did.
You need to know two things about pile before you order one. It shades: walk around the sofa and the colour shifts, sometimes dramatically, because you are seeing the fibres from a different angle. And it marks: sit on it and you leave a lighter patch where the pile has been pushed over. Both are characteristics of velvet rather than faults, and both brush out in seconds — but if a sofa that always looks identical is what you want, this is not the one.
Crushed Velvet
12 colours. The same pile as a plush velvet, deliberately pressed in random directions so the sheen breaks into a rippled, high-contrast shimmer. It is the loudest fabric on this page by some distance, and it throws a lot of light around a room.
There is a genuinely practical reason to choose it over a plush velvet, though, and it is not obvious: because the surface is already irregular in every direction, the sit marks that show on a plush velvet have nowhere to show. They land in a pattern that is already broken and vanish. Of the two velvets, this is the low-maintenance one.
Naple
11 colours. The plain one. Naple is a fine, flat, tightly ribbed weave — very close vertical cords with a low sheen along them and almost no shine otherwise. There is no pile to shade, no pattern to read, and no texture competing for attention. It is a sofa that is a shape rather than a surface.
That flatness cuts both ways. It is the most restrained fabric here and the easiest to put in a room that already has a lot going on. It is also the least forgiving: dust, pet hair and pale crumbs sit on top of an even surface with nothing to hide in. If you have a light-shedding dog, choose almost anything else on this page.
Marble
9 colours. A soft short pile carrying an irregular, stone-like veining, so the tone shifts across a single cushion and no two areas match. The swatches show it clearly — what looks like one grey at a distance is four or five close up.
It is the most decorative fabric we offer, and the most situational. In a plain room it does a lot of work on its own. In a room that already has a patterned rug and busy walls it will argue with them. It hides everyday marks as well as chenille does, for the same reason — there is no flat, even ground for anything to show against.
PVC Leather
9 colours. This is not leather, and we would rather say so on the page than have you find out from the swatch. It is a coated fabric with a leather-look grained surface, and it behaves like a coating rather than like a hide.
What that gets you is the reason most people choose it: nothing soaks in. A spill sits on the surface and comes off with a damp cloth, which no fabric on this page can offer. It needs no conditioner, unlike real leather, which will crack if you never feed it.
What it costs you is everything hide does over time. It will not soften, it will not develop a patina, and it will look much the same in year five as it does on delivery day — depending on your view, that is either the entire point or the whole objection. It also does not breathe the way leather does, so it can feel cold to sit down on in January and warm in July.
Three, free, through your letterbox
Tap any of the 70 swatches above and we will post you up to 3 of them, anywhere on the UK mainland. There is nothing to pay, nothing to send back, and no account to make.
We ring you before anything goes in the post. That is not a sales call — it is because people quite often pick three shades of the same grey when what they actually wanted was to see a grey next to a mink next to a charcoal, and two minutes on the phone saves a week.
If you already know roughly what you are after and would rather not read the rest of this, the free samples page is the same 70 swatches with a filter over them and none of the explaining.
Ordering without samples
You can. Made-to-order sofas are built to your specification, which means they fall outside the 14-day change-of-mind right that applies to everything else we sell — so the fabric you choose is the fabric you keep. If there is any doubt at all, wait for the samples. They take a few days and they cost nothing.
Why your screen is lying to you
Every swatch on this page was photographed under one set of lights and is being shown to you on a screen we have never seen, in a room we know nothing about. Phone displays boost saturation. Monitors are calibrated differently or, more often, not at all. A north-facing living room at 4pm in November is a completely different light source from a photography studio.
The small colour dot behind each swatch while the photograph loads is an approximation we store to avoid a grey box — it is a placeholder, never a claim about the cloth. The photograph is closer, and a sample in your own hand, held against your own wall, at the time of day you actually use the room, is the only one of the three that settles it.
Ready to see one in the flesh?
Pick your samples above, or come and sit on the frames at the Blackburn showroom before you decide on either.
Once you have chosen, every made-to-order frame in the shop offers the whole library at the same price. Looking after it afterwards is the care guide; making sure it gets through the door is the size guide.