There’s a green velvet armchair in the corner of our office that has ended conversations rather than begun them, and won. It still sits there.
Half of us believe a velvet armchair is the best purchase anyone can make when it comes to furnishing a room. The kind of thing that elevates a corner, lends it an air of completion even if the rest of the flat is crumbling around you. The other half of us think it’s a velvet prison masquerising as a luxury, the thing you buy when you feel like you can treat yourself before realising you’ll be apologising for it to guests ever since.
To both our factions, our evidence speaks loudly.
What nobody debates however is sitting in them. A velvet armchair has a way of enveloping you that a sofa will never master. Sitting in one is more of an occasion; your arms sweep out wide before you settle, rather than balance on the arm like everything else in the room.
You land.
One of our chairs has a patch worn into the left arm where someone rests their mug, tirelessly every single time without fail for the best part of four years and no one has ever spoken up against the treason because the chair clearly doesn’t mind.
Its velvet disagrees with you at first.
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Brush your hand down one way and it’s thick, lush green. Another and it’ll gleam as if it’s almost silver. Cats see it as a welcome, toddlers see it as a painting and whichever way you look at it, our chair has weathered them both with surprising ease. One quick brush down and it’s back to pretending to murder anyone who so much as stares at it wrong.
You will definitely argue over which shape to buy though. Someone will always want the low, squat number you can curl into sideways with a book and knees tucked up against you. Someone else will always champion the upright design with arms you can actually sit in because guess what they read like, an adult.
Purchased one of each over two years in separate rooms and to this day the arguments continue; someone always thinks they won the velvet armchair battle.
Everyone is united by regret on the colour front though.
Go bold.
Mustard. Emerald. That deep rust you talked yourself out of in the store because “it was too much?” Us too. Everyone in this office has colourful furniture they didn’t really want years later. No one in this office regrets the bright velvet armchair they pretended was a staying decision at the time. Several of us regret grey velvet chair that sits in a spare room collecting dust.
Velvet is never meant to be practical. The one seat in your house people will fight over on a Sunday is the velvet armchair, wasn’t it? Guess that answers that.
