Photograph by Florent Tanet. No piece of furniture better embodies English tradition than the leather Chesterfield. Originally stuffed with horsehair, the sofa, whose rolled arms flow into a high, button-tufted back, is thought to have been commissioned in the mid-18th century by Lord Philip Stanhope, the fourth earl of Chesterfield, reportedly as a place for his male guests to sit without rumpling their frock coats. Although Sigmund Freud used a Victorian daybed covered with a Persian carpet for his psychoanalysis sessions, his grandson the artist Lucian Freud posed his daughters on a Chesterfield in his studio in 1988 and painted “Bella and Esther.”
This provenance made the sofa an ideal inspiration for the French designer Michel Ducaroy at Ligne Roset. In 1976, a few years after the debut of his still-ubiquitous slouchy Togo sofa, reminiscent of a squeezed tube of toothpaste, he created the Kashima, his version of the Chesterfield — engineered using just two kinds of ultradense foam — which the company is now reissuing in 22 fabrics and leathers, including this mustard-coloured wool-nylon blend. With buttoned squares stitched from the inside and playfully pinched corners, it gives the illusion of structure, even if its embrace is as cozy as a cashmere cloud. Ligne Roset Kashima sofa, $11,250, domo.com.au.
