Name: The free-range couch.
Age: As old as upholstery.
Appearance: Posh.
AKA: A floating sofa.
Is this anything to do with couch-surfing? No, the opposite. Couch-surfing suggests homelessness, but the free-range couch is a sign of wealth.
What even is a free-range couch? Strictly speaking, it’s a sofa that sits in the middle of your living room.
What’s the big deal about that? It’s an example of what’s known as “quiet luxury” – a subtle marker of relaxed affluence.
How does a free-range couch make you seem rich? A floating sofa means your living space is vast enough to let your furniture roam free, away from the walls.
Where does this idea come from? Like most handy-but-suspect lifestyle signifiers these days, it comes from TikTok. According to the website Apartment Therapy, the idea “first made the viral rounds back in 2022, but it still has a chokehold on social media”.
So it isn’t a reliable indicator of poshness? It depends on who you ask. According to the sofa website Swyft, “floating a standard or corner sofa in the middle of a small room can actually make the space feel bigger”.
That seems a little counterintuitive. If I put a corner sofa in the middle of my living room, I wouldn’t be able to get out. They also say that “sofas can almost act as room dividers”, signalling where the living room ends and the kitchen begins.
I just hang washing in between them. It really helps define the space. Ikea, meanwhile, says: “When your sofa is your bed, and your living room is your bedroom, you can place your furniture in the middle of the room to free up space around the walls for storage.”
And I say: when your sofa is your bed, you are not living in quiet luxury. Exactly – there are, it transpires, several non-posh reasons for having a free-range couch.
For instance, it would reduce my couch-to-5K journey by a good two metres. Yeah, there’s that.
Are there, conversely, posh reasons for putting your sofa against the wall? To hide the door of your safe, maybe?
I do it to hide the bit where the cat clawed the back of the sofa to shreds. That could be posh and not posh. It’s confusing.
Do say: “Work with what you have, and never worry about what other people think.”
Don’t say: “I’m a free-range couch potato – I just moved it here to be closer to the fridge.”
