Art for Your Sofa

A printed cushion has one surface. Light falls across it evenly and the pattern lies flat, because ink has no direction.

A pieced one has as many surfaces as it has panels. Velvet has a pile, and pile has direction: the same color, cut and turned, reads darker one way and lighter the other. So a piece assembled from panels set at different angles shifts as you cross the room. Two panels dyed in the same bath will not look like the same color, and are not meant to.

Christina Lundsteen designs in colorways rather than colors. A piece is not blue; it is a set of tones held in one face, chosen for how they behave beside each other.

Which is why the palettes sound, described in words, as though they should not work. Barley next to wine. Old rose against petrol. Cut into geometry and set in velvet they resolve, because the proportions between the tones were decided as carefully as the tones.

Every piece is cut and assembled by hand, in Europe. Many are made to order, built after they are chosen rather than pulled from a stack. It is a slower way to work and it shows: in the corners, in the weight, in the fact that the seams meet where they should.

A cushion is roughly the size of a small painting, and it sits at eye level when you are seated. Unlike a painting, you are in contact with it.

So hold it to the standard of a small work rather than a furnishing. Is the composition resolved. Does the color do something you had not thought of. A sofa is the largest surface in most rooms and the one most often left to do nothing. Art for your sofa is a description of where the work goes.