This Groovy Secondhand Sofa Got a Makeover That Feels Like Pure Sunshine
There are some secondhand furniture finds that are too good to pass up — like this statement sofa that spins and kind of looks like a puzzle, as its proud new owner Tory Tawlks describes. Tory spotted the sofa on OfferUp, thought about it for a couple days, then knew it had to be hers.
“I love curvy furniture,” she says. “I like things that are kind of playful.” The sofa originally belonged to an art collector and his family, and Tory loved the silhouette (great for conversations, she says), but she didn’t so much love the patterned fabric, so she got it professionally reupholstered.
The sofa got a soft new chartreuse fabric.
The hardest part of giving the piece a new life, Tory says, was choosing a new fabric, and she actually turned to a lot of framed artwork in her home for inspiration.
“I started noticing just different hues of yellow,” she says, so she took home several swatches from F&S Fabrics in Los Angeles and landed on a “lemon yellow” with “undertones of chartreuse green,” as she describes.
Tory says it was slightly difficult to choose a yellow that still felt calming. “I want to walk in my house and feel restful, but I don’t want to just stay with neutrals,” she says, and Tory believes she found the perfect shade. She describes the sofa as “spinning sunshine.”
The piece fits perfectly in the living room.
The second-hardest part of making the sofa her own was physically getting it up the stairs of her apartment (it’s huge), but now it feels right at home. “It’s a centerpiece,” Tory says. “It’s art. It’s also community in a way … It’s just so easy to have fun and be able quite literally to turn in any direction and talk to anybody.”
She says she also loves that the sofa has a retro feel to it; it meshes well with Tory’s other vintage furniture and her favorite new addition, a chrome turntable.
“It’s just fun to play with chrome, to play with brass, and play with really old, interesting textures with my art and tapestry, and then play with playful shapes and bold shapes like my couch,” Tory says. “My style … it’s got an Art Deco feeling to it — and just a little bit of past and future.”
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