The Sussex Wing Chair, After a Winter
A wing-back in a deep claret velvet, six months in. On the sustained pleasure of sitting upright, the failure of a seat cushion, and the small repair that saved the chair.
I have been sitting in the Sussex for six months. It is a wing-back, in a deep claret velvet, with a tight back and a single loose cushion. It cost less than I would have expected for what it is, which made me suspicious going in, and what I have to report is that the suspicion was correctly calibrated and ultimately well-rewarded. The Sussex is a chair that is almost very good and a few specific small repairs from being entirely so. This is the most honest thing I can say about most furniture in this price range. ¹
Let me describe the chair. The frame is hardwood, sat on castored front legs and squared back legs. The wings are full and high, tall enough that a reader can lean their head against one without noticing. The arms are scrolled in the conservative English manner. The single cushion is a wrap of feather over high-density foam, and it is here that the chair's first failure lives, which I will return to.
The velvet is the most successful thing about the Sussex. It is a worsted-cotton velvet, not synthetic, and after six months of nightly use it has developed the soft pile-bruising that real velvet does, the small dark patches where a body has rested most often that read, in proper light, as evidence of life rather than damage. Synthetic velvets do not do this. They develop pilling and shine and look, after a year, distinctly worse than they did new. A worsted cotton velvet improves. The Sussex's velvet has begun to improve.
Furniture that creaks is not necessarily failing furniture. Old furniture creaks. A creak in a six-month-old wing chair is a TODO.
The wing-back is, of all upholstered forms, the most architectural. A roll-arm sofa is a horizontal proposition. A club chair is a low and conspiratorial one. A wing-back is vertical. It says: here is a place to sit upright, with a book, in a draft. The Sussex achieves this verticality through correct proportions of seat depth to back height. Many wing-backs sold today have shortened the seat depth in pursuit of a smaller-room compatibility, which is fine, except that they have left the back height alone, which produces a chair that feels stunted in the seat and looming in the head. The Sussex is correctly proportioned. A six-foot reader can sit fully back without their feet leaving the floor and without the wings cresting unnaturally high. ²
The seat cushion failed at twelve weeks. By failed I mean that the foam core had compressed unevenly, settling more under the right thigh than the left, which gave the cushion a slight tilt that the eye could not see but the body felt within ninety seconds of sitting down. This is a high-density-foam failure, and it is common, and it is correctable. I unzipped the cushion, removed the foam core, took it to a small upholstery shop in Easthampton, and had a replacement core cut in a denser foam with a Dacron wrap. Eighty-five dollars. The cushion now seats correctly and will, the upholsterer assured me, do so for at least seven years.
I tell this story because it is the story of most upholstered furniture in this price tier. The frame is sound. The fabric is sound. The cushion fill is the place where money has been saved, and the cushion fill is the most easily corrected. If you are buying upholstery in this range, factor a hundred dollars and a Saturday morning into your plan, and you will own a chair you can sit in for a decade rather than three years.
The wings have proven more useful than I anticipated. There is a residual draft from the window beside the chair, slight enough that I had not registered it before the chair arrived, and the wings completely defeat it. A book read in the Sussex is read in a microclimate of one's own making. This is, I think, what the wing-back was originally for, and what it remains for. A reading chair without wings is fundamentally a less comfortable thing. ³
The frame creaks in one place, which is the right rear corner, when sat in heavily. I have not yet investigated the source of the creak, though I suspect a loose corner block. This is a five-minute repair with a screwdriver and a tube of wood glue and I will get to it. Furniture that creaks is not necessarily failing furniture. Old furniture creaks. A creak in a hundred-year-old wing chair is part of the chair's character. A creak in a six-month-old wing chair is a TODO.
The cost of the Sussex was approximately one-third of what a comparable Howard chair restoration would have cost, and approximately one-fifth of what a new bench-made wing-back from a small American shop would have cost. The Sussex is not those chairs. It is a competent chair from a mid-tier manufacturer, made in a way that requires the buyer to do small remedial work to make it excellent. After six months, with the cushion replaced and the corner block (eventually) glued, I expect to have a chair that I would not be ashamed to keep for thirty years, at a price that allows me to keep it.