Your white couch doesn’t have to be a white elephant in the room
With the proper precautions, furniture need not fall prey to red wine and messy kids
My white sofa was meant to be a triumph of adulthood.
I was newly graduated from university and eager to leave behind the student-apartment esthetic, with its futon sofa beds, cinder-block coffee tables and other furnishings pilfered from the curb. Having cast those off along with the cap and gown and moved across the country with my then-fiancé, the creamy-coloured Ikea sofa would become the centrepiece of our grown-up living room, paired with a couple of mid-century office chairs picked up at a thrift store.
Primed for this purchase by early exposure to my mother’s copies of Architectural Digest, I shut out any thoughts of the light colour’s impracticality, so convinced was I that the crisp, neutral upholstery would go the distance since — after all — it went with everything!
What I hadn’t considered is that it would also have to go with two children.
With our first baby on the way, I came up with what I figured was the perfect solution — make our off- white sofa whiter still! By this point I had stacks of decor magazines of my own that promised pure-white slipcovers were imminently practical because all manner of baby spit-up and wine stains could be bleached right out of them.
So we had slipcovers made for the sofa and purchased a cushy armchair to match that came with its own removable white covers.
It looked fantastic at first, but we hadn’t counted on how much work it would be to take the slipcovers off, wash them, and — most challenging of all — get them back on, as often as we’d need to, especially once we had two active sofa gymnasts in the house.
Even air-drying them (oh so elegantly) on radiators around the house wouldn’t prevent them from shrinking a little, making it a herculean effort to stretch them over the frames.
I’m not going to lie — sometimes there were tears.
I’d try to get both boys washed up before they made slipcover contact, but who wants to be a super-nag that won’t let her children live in the living room?
Besides, I’d only need to turn my head for a moment and my toddler would have wriggled away from the breakfast table and made a jam-facefirst front flip over the back of the armchair he loved so much.
Unsurprisingly, the look ended up being more shabby than chic.
Years later, with the slipcovers stained from the nondiligence we brought to their care (not to mention nibbled away at the bottom by our adopted pet bunny, who liked to disappear under the couch to escape from the humans), I gave it away on Craigslist to a young couple moving into their first apartment, and replaced it with a hard-wearing, beige, tufted-leather sofa.
But mine is not the only white sofa story. There are others more knowledgeable about furniture maintenance who’ve been far more successful with light upholstery.
Take interior designer Lisa Canning, for example. She has five children, including a newborn, yet she purchased an off-white sofa as part of a home renovation a year ago.
“Everyone thought I was insane,” says Canning, but given her main floor features dark wallpaper, she wanted light upholstery to balance things out. “We had the couch coated with a protective spray. When anything spills on the sofa, it pools; it doesn’t seep into the fibres.”
Plus, the company that sprayed the piece offers a five-year warranty on the job. “That made it a really easy decision to go with white.”
“We’ve gotten every conceivable thing on it, like cherry juice, paint, chocolate, and as long as I am able to get to it right away, I haven’t had a problem. I knew that that would have to be part of the behaviour pattern with buying a white sofa, so I’ve never let a stain sit.”
Instead she keeps a baby wipe nearby to sop up spills and encourages the kids to eat at the kitchen island instead of on the sofa.
So there you have it. I’m not sure if things like MagiSeal, the coating Canning used, were around when I was a newbie decorator; I wasn’t exactly an informed furniture buyer back then.
But clearly it is possible to mix white sofas and kids. You just have to know what you’re doing, and be armed and ready to handle peanut buttery fingers and sloppy red wine drinkers.
Perhaps if I’d known better, I’d still be sitting on the white sofa that held such promise.