The Drawing Room
An edit, room by room, of the considered drawing room. Notes on the sofa, the wing-back, and the side table that holds the evening together.
The drawing room is, at its best, a room one walks into and slows down. It is not the kitchen, where speed is at least sometimes a virtue, and it is not the bedroom, where retreat is the explicit task. The drawing room is the room of the second cup of tea, the unhurried conversation, the long Sunday afternoon. Its furniture has to permit those things and ideally to encourage them. The objects we have edited for this lookbook are the ones we have found to do that work.
We have spent a winter in our drawing rooms, and the rooms have spent a winter on us. What follows is what we have learned about the small architectural decisions that turn a sitting room into a drawing room: the height of the wing, the depth of the seat, the weight of the side table, the lamp that knows its job.
There is a fashion in current upholstery for the soft and the squashy and the deeply slouched. We are not against this fashion, exactly. There are rooms in which a slouched sofa is the right answer, and we have a few of them. But the drawing room is not the room for the deeply slouched. The drawing room asks for furniture that holds its shape, that maintains an upright sitting posture in its bones, that can absorb three guests on a Tuesday evening and look, on Wednesday morning, more or less the same. This is a different brief from the brief of the family room, and the difference matters.
The wing-back, properly considered, is the drawing room's anchor object. A correctly proportioned wing-back will define the rest of the room around it; an incorrectly proportioned one will fight the rest of the room indefinitely. We will say it again, because it bears repeating: the wing-back is the most architectural of upholstered forms, and treating it as a piece of decorative furniture rather than as an architectural element is the most common mistake the home decorator makes in this room.
The side table, by the way, should be heavier than you think. A drawing-room side table is meant to anchor a corner, hold a cup that contains tea or whiskey or both, and not migrate when bumped. The featherweight side tables that have been fashionable in the last decade - aluminum trays on hairpin legs - are not drawing-room tables. They are family-room tables. The drawing room asks for solid wood, brass-tipped feet, and the sort of weight that makes the table a permanent fixture rather than a movable one.
We will admit, in closing, that the considered drawing room is a slightly unfashionable room. It is slow. It is upright. It encourages conversation rather than streaming. The contemporary alternative - the open-plan living-and-dining-and-kitchen - has no place for a drawing room and would not know what to do with one. We would gently suggest that this is the open-plan's loss, not the drawing room's.