People come to us with a colour in mind and no idea about the cloth, then spend six weeks on the colour and four minutes on the weave. It is the wrong way round. The weave decides whether you still like the sofa in year four; the colour decides whether you like the photograph.
Start with the room, not the swatch
One question does most of the work: what happens on this piece? A sofa that takes two adults and a dog every evening is a different problem from a bedroom chair that holds a dressing gown. The first needs forty thousand rubs and a stain grade of four. The second can be linen at twenty-four thousand and nobody will ever know.
What Martindale actually tells you
A disc of worsted wool is rubbed against the cloth in a figure of eight until two threads give. That count is the Martindale. Twenty thousand is a guest room, forty thousand is a family sitting room, a hundred thousand belongs in a railway station. Past about fifty thousand the number stops discriminating between cloths in a domestic setting — a bouclé at forty-two thousand and a performance weave at a hundred thousand will both outlive your interest in them.
Stain grade matters more than abrasion
Almost nobody wears a sofa out. They spill on it. Our stain grades run one to five and come from our own panel: red wine, olive oil and ballpoint, left thirty minutes, cleaned the way a customer would clean it. Washed linen is a two and it will keep a shadow. Solution-dyed acrylic is a five and comes out completely, including with dilute bleach.
Light is the quiet killer
A south-facing bay will take three shades out of a piece-dyed cloth in four summers. If your sofa sits in direct afternoon sun, the blue wool scale number matters more than anything else on the label. Four is fine away from a window. Seven means the pigment was locked into the fibre before it was spun, and that cloth will still match its own arm in a decade.
Then, finally, colour
Order the swatches. Tape them to the wall the sofa is actually going against. Look at them in the morning and again under your own lamps at night. Half the cloths people are certain about on a screen are eliminated within two days of being in the room, and that is the cheapest elimination you will ever make.
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