It's So Hard To Say Goodbye

To yesterday's sofa:

Melanie Acevedo for Domino

But last Friday I did. I ditched the sofa (settee? canape??) I bought when I was 14 for 40 bucks. Pa Olsen drove it back from the thrift store that day and repaired one broken leg before I went to town with a staple gun and duct tape for its first transformation, a Donna-Karan-in-the-Hamptons moment in white cotton duck. Eight years later it was all about teal velvet before I moved back to New York at the end of my last real summer vacation. I did all the tufting myself! Dad left our Pensacola homestead with no electrical power and four fallen oak trees (post-Hurricane Ivan) and delivered this sofa and a vanload of flea market treasures to my fourth floor walkup studio on lower Fifth Avenue, located in a former gentleman's quarters. Special thanks also goes to Amy, my absentee apartment co-hunter, for a complete act of grace:

Me: "Well, not exactly a two-bedroom, but it's fabulous and I think we can make it work."
Amy: "If you love it, I'll love it."

She lasted a year. I miss her and our gigunda green marble bathroom, but not that zebra print cowhide. Fast forward again to 2010 and I'm feeling glazed chintz slipcovers, but without Lonny co-founder Michelle Williams asking to shoot my "new" place, this baby never would've been born:

Patrick Cline for Lonny

Same frame sofa under that cuckoo print and bulbous arm pads.

Decorators have to be sort of ruthless and unsentimental, because how much stuff do we see or buy in a week's time? Too much. If I held on to the first version of everything I ever liked and bought, I'd need a storage unit the size of Staten Island. My tastes have evolved (thank God!) but I still love the story factor, that a forty dollar thrift store sofa ended up on the cover of a national (and my favorite) magazine. Did Anthro rip it off? If so, consider me sincerely flattered:


And until last Friday, extremely uncomfortable. Honestly, I've sat on stadium bleachers with better ergonomics than this baby. The new arms limit seating space and my sloping tenement floor sort of makes you slide toward the teevee. I've been in the market for a replacement but never got That Old Feeling until I met silver-gray salvation at Doyle:

I'm putting the single arm piece in a corner, so now I'll have an armless banquette, four feet on one side and almost seven on the other, with loose, DOWN-FILLED seat and back cushions with buttoned Turkish corners. And silk bullion fringe! I'll clean the linen velvet but overall it's in great condition, and in month or so I might have an itch to redecorate this entire place in blue-grays and lavenders. Will I miss Ol' Chintzy? Probably not. As I tell my clients when they bust out some relic of a former life: "You bought it, you loved it, now time to kiss it and say goodbye."