A sofa is one of the biggest investments you can make in home decor, and the last thing you want is to make the wrong choice. A good sofa will be with you for a decade, and it should not only be comfortable and look great, but it should also have the versatility to adapt to your needs in new spaces and the seasons of your life.
You should consider a modular sofa. This is one that comes in individual pieces that you can pull apart, put together, and rearrange to fit whatever you can imagine. You can usually change the color of the cover without buying a whole new sofa. And when moving day comes, you won’t need a team of three or four well-built movers to get it out of the old doorway and into the new one.
I’ve been running our best sofa covers for years, and many of us on the Wired Reviews team have tested more than our fair share of different variations on the living room seat. Modular sofas are the way to go.
Switch things up…
If you move or travel a lot, a modular sofa is easy to take apart. No more playing Tetris in U-Haul trying to figure out how you’re going to get your old sofa to your new place. And it’s easy to reconfigure, too. Say you’re working from home and you get a new desk and you need the chair part of your sofa to face a different direction. You don’t need a new sofa, and you don’t need to completely rearrange your living room—you can just reconfigure your existing modular sofa. Or maybe you get a new coffee table and you don’t like how long your sofa is in comparison. Take the space. It’s that easy.
That’s what happened recently to Wired Reviews team director Martin Cizmar, who bought a new house and discovered that his new living room was functionally narrower than expected because of a large air register on the floor. Since he had a modular sofa from Koala, he simply removed one of the seats to turn it into an L-shape and put the extra sectional in his attic for future use.
While there are plenty of standard, rectangular, boxy options, you can also play around with different fabrics and silhouettes. One example is the Castlery Auburn Performance Fabric Sectional Modular Sofa, featuring a fluffy, spill-resistant bulclé fabric and a bubbly, modern silhouette.
Modular sofas can also come in handy if you have unconventional living arrangements. Do you live on the seventh floor? A modular sofa comes in many boxes, not as one gigantic package—you might have more steps to deal with, but you won’t have to fork out more money for white-glove delivery, nor will you have to convince friends to maneuver the sofa up several flights of stairs, cursing at the banister and scraping their drugs in narrow hallways. No ruined friendships because you said “left” and they tipped the whole sofa the wrong way. No thrown backs or coming off hinges. I’ve had a few modular sofas delivered to apartments with stairs, and I was able to get them into my apartment myself. (And if your stairs are a lot, you’ll only have to convince one friend to help you—not many of them, nor a truck.)
… Again and again
Modular sofas offer extra flexibility when it comes to configurations. You can make them into an L-shaped sectional, a U-shaped sectional, or a traditional straight line. You can choose deep seats or shallower ones, and there are a variety of upholstery finishes, from durable pet-friendly performance fabric to chenille. You could get a sleeper sofa or one designed for small spaces. Most have removable, machine-washable covers, and some even have extra bells and whistles like built-in storage or a way to charge your phone. The Loveac Sactional is fully modular—we gave it a special review—and you can add StealthTech, which gives it a home theater experience in the comfort of your convertible sofa, complete with seats. It’s more likely than you think.
Modular sofas tend to be more expensive than standard options, but the convenience often outweighs the initial investment cost. For a modular sectional sofa, I find it’s best to go with the bare minimum with a standard three-seater sofa and an additional piece like a chaise lounge. That way you can move things around, but you won’t be stuck with too much extra seating, and you should still have room for an ottoman or coffee table. Of course, if you want to go with an oversized eight-seater, you can do that too. There are some truly gargantuan modular options available, like the COZEY CIELLO XL. You can even opt for an outdoor sofa, like the Outdoor Teak Outdoor Loveseat , which comes with a built-in cover to protect your patio furniture from the elements.
And while they tend to be pricey, there are still some relatively affordable modular sofa options if you’re on a tighter budget. The Albany Park Kova has been an honorable mention in our buying guide for a couple of years now, and it costs the same or less than similar sofas that aren’t as customizable.
The long and short of it is that a modular sofa is pretty much the same as your standard, stuck-in-place sofa. You’ll still get a solid warranty. You’ll still get high-quality, high-density memory foam cushions, plush backs, and comfortable back cushions. You still have the options of solid wood frames and stain-resistant fabric. But at the end of the day, you can change things up if you need to—something that’s only easy to do when you have a modular sofa.
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