Buying guides ·
Which sofa fabric survives a Nepali home?
There are only three questions that matter when choosing sofa fabric, and none of them is about colour.
Three questions, then the colour
Customers usually start with colour and work backwards, which is why so many living rooms contain a beautiful fabric that was wrong for the household. Start instead with three questions: are there children under ten, is there a pet, and does direct sun fall on where the sofa will sit? Those three answers eliminate most of the fabric library before you look at a single swatch.
Cotton-linen blend — the sensible default
A tight-weave cotton-linen blend is what we put on most family sofas and what we would recommend to most readers. It breathes, which matters in a Kathmandu summer. It takes a mark and releases it. It does not water-spot. And it looks like furniture rather than upholstery.
Pure linen is a different thing and we mostly steer people away from it. It creases permanently, it marks with water, and in a household with children it will look tired within a year while a blend of the same colour still looks intentional.
Velvet — but only the right velvet
There are two materials sold as velvet in Nepal and they behave nothing alike. Polyester velvet is durable, cleans well, resists water spotting and is entirely suitable for a family sofa or a café. Silk-look velvet, sometimes called crushed or shimmer velvet, water-spots permanently, flattens where people sit and shows every mark. It photographs magnificently and it is a trap.
We will build in polyester velvet cheerfully. For commercial orders we will not build in silk-look velvet at all, even when asked, because we would be replacing it within eighteen months.
Jacquard — the pattern that hides a decade
Jacquard is woven with the pattern in the structure rather than printed on the surface, which gives it two advantages that matter in a busy Nepali house. Wear appears gradually rather than as a sudden shiny patch, and the pattern itself camouflages ordinary marks. It suits traditional shapes — camelback, roll-arm, carved frames — far better than plain cloth does. It is the fabric that ages most gracefully in our whole library.
Boucle — lovely, with one specific enemy
Boucle's looped texture hides light marks well and holds colour better than a flat weave under sunlight, which is why it works so well on our Scandinavian and mid-century models. It has exactly one serious enemy: claws. A cat will find the loops within a week and pull them into long runs that cannot be repaired invisibly. If there is a cat in the house, choose a flat weave and thank us later.
PU leather versus genuine hide
PU leather is a sensible, unglamorous choice in three situations: rental flats, offices, and manual recliners. It wipes clean, it does not hold kitchen smells, and it survives about ten years of ordinary use at a fraction of the price of hide.
Its limit is honest and specific: it wears through at high-friction points — headrests, button hollows, front seat edges — in roughly five to seven years of heavy use. So on a piece you intend to keep for fifteen years, particularly a motorised recliner or a Chesterfield, genuine leather is the correct choice even though it roughly doubles the figure. If the budget will not stretch, we would rather sell you a manual recliner in hide than a motorised one in PU.
Sunlight is the quiet killer
Nepal sits at altitude and the ultraviolet load is higher than most buyers assume. Every fabric fades; the question is how fast and how evenly. Mustard, rust, charcoal and natural oatmeal hold up best. Deep blue, bright green and dark red fade first and fade unevenly, which is worse. If your sofa must sit in a south-facing window, choose from the first group, and consider a light curtain — it will add years to the cloth.
Take the quiz, or just send a photograph
Our Fabric and Materials page has a three-question quiz that asks exactly the questions above and recommends a fabric family. Or send us a photograph of your living room on WhatsApp and tell us who lives in it. We will tell you what we would put in our own house.
— Written in the workshop. Questions to 9849239091 on WhatsApp.