A sofa bed is often a practical addition to living spaces, offering a comfortable place for impromptu guests to sleep. Furthermore, it takes up less space than a guest room and offers more comfort than an inflatable bed.
Long gone are the days when having a sofa bed meant tolerating an uncomfortable sofa to sit in. Thanks to modern technology and a larger focus on comfort, the market is full of sofa beds worth the investment.
Better than a standard sofa
Nowadays, furniture designers and manufacturers like Heal’s have poured over every detail to ensure optimum comfort. Modern designs don’t necessitate discomfort for the sake of having a pull-out bed.
With designs like the Pillow Sofa Bed, you can have a modern sofa without sacrificing feather-filled cushions and comfortable padding. Nowadays, your main living room sofa can easily have an integrated bed without it being obvious to the sitter.
No compromising on comfort
If your sofa bed is going to be regularly used as both a sofa and a bed, you shouldn’t need to compromise on comfort. In this case, designs such as the Snooze Sofa Bed stand above the rest. Offering premium comfort as a sofa, it also unfolds into a comfortable double bed.
Most interestingly, a pocket-sprung mattress is integrated into the design. Pocket-sprung mattresses have long been regarded as a superior option, offering a higher level of comfort than standard foam mattress.
A versatile sofa
For occasional use, a simple fold-down sofa could be the answer to your prayers. These versatile sofas provide a comfortable place to sit, but transform into a sofa in a matter of seconds. You can find this style of sofa in a variety of styles and finishes, but we love the Hinge Luxe Sofa Bed.
This comfortable sofa is available in a host of upholstery options so you can find one that suits your space. Furthermore, the cushioning boasts pocket springs for comfort that’ll guarantee a good night’s sleep.
Easy to unfold
Whilst fold-down sofa beds are remarkably easy to use, more traditional mechanisms aren’t difficult to master. Over the years, advancing technology has meant that modern sofa beds with metal frames are easy to use. In addition, uncomfortable foam padding has been replaced with memory foam mattresses. The Heal’s Oswald Sofa Bed is one of our most-loved designs.
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[ INSPIRATION ]
Tips & advice
Want to design your own bespoke dining table? Well, thanks to the Heal’s Bespoke Dining collection, it’s never been easier to step into the role of designer.
By choosing your own legs, wood, size and finish, you can create a table that suits your taste.
There are over 2000 options available and coordinating benches to complete the look. We’ve created this useful guide to help you get started designing your own table.
1.
Choose your leg style
Find your perfect table legs with four different styles to choose from. The criss-crossed Oslo base offers a contemporary silhouette. Slim and splayed, Madrid is ideal for bringing a sleek and minimal look to your home.
Harking back to the Arts and Crafts era, Lisbon features a refectory-style base. For more industrial homes, Prague is ideal thanks to its wide metal structure.
2.
Choose your edge profile
Now you’ve selected your legs, the next step is to choose the edge profile to suit you. Fans of clean lines and minimalist finished are likely to be drawn towards the straight edge profile.
If you’re looking for a more contemporary design, a chamfered edge may be a good choice. This lends a touch of detailing to the table and streamlines the aesthetic.
A natural edge follows the natural grain of the wood and lends the finished design a more organic aesthetic.
3.
Choose your finish
Now’s the time to select the ultimate surface. Each table top is crafted using solid wood and is available in six different finishes.
These finishes include oiled oak in blonde, smoked, white, grey and natural finishes, as well as a natural walnut option. Each piece of wood boasts unique grains, knots and cracks that showcase the one-of-a-kind nature of your design.
5.
Choose your size
Next, grab your tape measure and figure out what size table you would like. The Designed By You collection offers seven lengths and two different widths. If you’d like a spot of guidance on choosing your table’s size, why not consult our dedicated buying guide?DINING TABLE BUYING GUIDE
6.
Filled or not filled?
This can be considered a baffling question, but really it’s quite simple. A filled table has a smooth surface with no holes for crumbs or dust. An unfilled table top showcases its grain in all its natural glory, with knots and cracks on display. Your choice will depend on your preference as well as how the table will be used.
DESIGN YOUR OWN TABLE
Furnishing your first apartment, new home or redesigned space is an exciting time. With so much choice, it’s tempting to go out and splurge on an array of furniture and home accessories at your nearest chain store.
But before you exhaust your budget, consider the following key factors for every piece you want to buy: Is it necessary? Is it adaptable? Is it high quality? Is it well-designed? Is it a fake? Is it a trend item? Will it still have the same appeal in five years’ time?
Answering these questions helps to decide when to invest in a piece of furniture and when you can get away with something inexpensive. Lot of elements can make a piece of furniture a good investment.
It could be a classic that will never go out of style and can be passed down to future generations. It could be a great quality item that you rely on every day. It could be a piece that serves multiple functions in your home. Ultimately, investment furniture pieces are the ones that will give you top value for your money.
Let’s look at investment pieces that are worth spending a bit more on.
Invest in classics – both past and future
What makes a piece of furniture classic? It’s a design that’s stood the test of time and looks just as good now as it did decades ago. Interior design trends are great, but they come and go. You don’t want to be stuck with a whole flat full of dated furniture in a decade’s time. Save your biggest splurges for pieces that will last a lifetime and beyond.
The Mistral Sofa & The Wallis Sofa
These days, people are spending more time than ever on their sofas. More people work from home, eat meals on their sofa rather than at the dining table, or binge-watch box sets in their free time. With all the hours spent on it, it’s important to select a quality sofa that’s well-designed and constructed to last.
The Mistral Sofa in Midnight Blue velvet
Our sophisticated Mistral Sofa brings 1950s style with a contemporary approach, offering timeless interior design for your space. Inspired by a mid-century modern aesthetic, this sofa adds a touch of vintage glamour to the home, remaining one of our most popular pieces for over a decade.
Choosing a sofa with a sturdy birch wood frame, like the Mistral, provides a lifetime guarantee – making it a great investment furniture piece. The Mistral sofa’s available in a range of sizes and fabrics to suit your home.
If you’re looking for a statement furniture piece that’s also a great investment, explore our skillfully upholstered Wallis Sofa. An exclusive collaboration with acclaimed designer Russell Pinch, it brings a modern take to the classic wingback sofa.
The Wallis sofa in Emerald Varese Velvet
A compact yet spacious design, the Wallis sofa is available as a generous three or four-seater style. Echoing a classic shape, it will no doubt add an elegant touch to your home's interior.
The Eames Lounge Chair & The Egg Chair
Ensuring comfort and longevity, the Eames Lounge Chair from Vitra is crafted with soft leather and plywood, allowing it to age beautifully. Regarded as one of the most iconic designs of its time, this piece personifies mid-century cool, making it the perfect investment piece for years to come.
The Eames Lounge Chair
While our elegant Egg Chair ensures the same, it offers a design that’s still as futuristic as it was in 1958, when Arne Jacobsen designed it. This cutting-edge style brings modernist luxury to any room. Use these leather chairs as a corner piece or an addition to your sofa arrangement.
The Egg Chair
The Cross-extending Dining Table
If you’re looking for the perfect dining table that your family can gather around for years to come – look no further! Our cross-extending dining table is the best furniture piece to enhance both your dining experience and dining space. It’s practical and adaptable; simple lines make this design one with a lasting impression.
The Cross Extending Dining Table
The extending table is adjustable, designed with a contemporary shaped base and two panelled leaves cleverly concealed within the frame. It quickly reconfigures for extra dining space, or for moving to a smaller or larger room. Our extending dining table complements any living space.
Invest in quality – where it really counts
All furniture is important, but some pieces can really affect your quality of life. You might not notice the lack of quality in a cheap side table, but you definitely will in a cheap mattress. Invest more money in the pieces that will impact you the most.
A great mattress
Investing in a quality mattress is essential. It ensures that you get a good night’s sleep, reduces the risk of back pain and allergies, and helps keep you healthy. We spend a third of our lives sleeping, so it’s important to get the most out of our slumber. When buying a mattress, be sure to select a type that best suits your needs: A pocket-sprung mattress with hand nested springs perfectly supports your movements while you sleep. Latex foam mattresses also offer hypoallergenic temperature regulation. To combine the best of both, choose a hybrid mattress.
Luxury Mattresses
It’s also important to choose the right mattress feel: A soft mattress is best for those who sleep on their side, while medium mattresses are great if you tend to change positions during sleep. Firm mattresses suit those who tend to sleep on their backs and need extra back and neck support. Generally, it’s safe to say that the more you pay for a mattress, the better quality you’ll get. Investing in a quality mattress means investing in quality sleep. All our mattresses come with a 10-year guarantee or lifetime guarantee.
Sturdy outdoor furniture
When considering outdoor furniture, it’s important to go for pieces that are highly adaptable, durable and built to withstand extreme weather conditions. Be prepared to pay more for garden furniture made from high-quality materials and built to last.
The Tanso Range Our robust Tanso garden furniture collection is made from weather resistant Grade A Teak. The range is perfectly suitable for outdoor use, yet its well-designed and detailed aesthetic means it looks just as good indoors as well.
Invest in adaptability – to get more from each piece
What’s better than one great piece of furniture? A great piece of furniture that can double as different pieces. It’s worth spending more on an item if you’ll get multiple uses out of it – think of it as saving the money you’d spend on buying two pieces.
A versatile sofa bed
A sofa bed is a great option when space is at a premium. Our adaptable sofa beds effortlessly turn any space into a bedroom or spare room. It’s one of the most versatile and hard-working pieces of furniture you could own. Providing the perfect sit or sleep day and night, a great sofa bed is as comfortable as a regular bed. Perfect for overnight guests, a sleeper sofa provides great style and a contemporary touch to your home.
The Snooze sofa bed
A reversible rug
Not all investment pieces have to be expensive. Decorate your space with rugs to transform your room without having to pay a fortune. When picking a rug to splurge on, go for neutral tones to not risk growing tired of brighter colours. Our reversible rugs give two equally stunning patterns in subtle light tones, allowing you to refresh your seasonal décor. Making a great investment item, rugs tend to get better with time and are easy to take with you when you move as well.
The Menda Reversible Rug
When selecting investment furniture pieces for your home, keep in mind that there’s more to consider than the piece’s initial appeal. Ensure that each piece is highly functional, well-designed and well-constructed, so that your furniture will last a lifetime, be integral to your home and can be handed down to the next generation.
Know your Arne from your Eames?
To help you spot the difference between a cheap knock-off and the real deal, we’ve put together this handy guide to some of our much-copied classics.
Starting 28th January 2017, a change in copyright law ensures that it is illegal for UK retailers to sell fake replicas of designer furniture, lighting and homeware. A triumph for iconic design, this means that a piece cannot be copied for up to 70 years rather than the previous 25 year gap, protecting the designers legacy and authenticity of the original design.
At Heal’s, we are proud to say that we have always stocked only genuine modern furniture designs from authorised brands and suppliers. Sadly, not all sellers have been as scrupulous as we are, and the UK is still awash with poor quality copies of iconic designs. So what are the things to look out for when searching for a design classic and how do you know if yours is the genuine article?
What is an “original” design?
People are often under the impression that to qualify as an “original,” a piece of furniture has to date back to an early production run. Yet this has no bearing on the design itself providing a legally authorised manufacturer has made it.
For example, the estate of Charles and Ray Eames has granted reproduction of the mid-century DSW chair (pictured above) exclusively to Vitra in Europe and Herman Miller in America. This ensures that the Eames’s iconic chair is made to the same standards of design and manufacture.
Original 1227 Desk Lamp
Still widely regarded as the archetypal Anglepoise lamp, the Original 1227 stems from engineer George Carwardine’s design for a new type of spring that could be moved easily yet remain rigid when held in position. It is these springs that indicate the authenticity of the design with each lamp using three independent springs to provide the arching mechanism. Other giveaways include the lamp’s on/off switch, which is positioned at the top of the shade, and the heavy table base made of cast iron with a steel cover.
The Eames Lounge Chair
The iconic Eames Lounge Chair has been the victim of untold inferior copies. The simplest way to identify a genuine design is by checking the underside of the seat shell where you will find the Vitra or Herman Miller logo (the only authorised manufacturers of Eames products in the world) alongside Charles Eames’ signature.
The base of the seat offers further clues. On a genuine Eames Lounge Chair the base has five legs in a star pattern (the ottoman has four), and is neither too flat to the floor nor too steeply angled. Fakes often have four-legged bases with a spring or rocking mechanism.
Designed to be ergonomic and extremely comfortable, the real the Eames Lounge Chair is set at a constant angle and does not recline. The smooth, seamless look of this chair means there are no visible screws or bolts in the veneered shell and it is instead held together by rubber shock mounts. This technique is expensive and time-consuming, so manufacturers of copies tend to take short cuts, such as using visible screws.
Arco Floor Lamp
Designed by Achille Castiglioni in 1962, to this day the Arco floor lamp is still produced in Italy by Flos. With the exception of an upgrade to the electrical system and a limited black marble base version in 2002, the use of white Carrara marble and stainless steel has remained unchanged since its launch over 50 years ago.
The most obvious form of Arco fakery lies in its base, with many manufacturers opting for a flat marble stand in order to scrimp on costs. Another useful way to identify a genuine Arco is to check the inside of the polished aluminium ring that surrounds the perforated diffuser, where, provided its genuine, you will find a label displaying the Flos logo.
The arm of the Arco lamp can also be cast up to two metres from the base and should feature three settings that allow you to adjust the length of its projection. If ever in doubt as to a designs origin, it is always worth researching and contacting the manufacturer of the certified piece.
Of course, the best way to ensure you never mistake a fake for the genuine article is to visit Heal’s in-store or online where you’ll find a host of classic and contemporary pieces certified by the designers themselves.
An easy and affordable way to redecorate your home, a designer light bulb can set the mood at the flick of a switch. From exposed to diffused, incandescent to decorative LED bulbs , there’s plenty to choose from with each type suited to a particular purpose or style.
The right light bulb will enhance a room, complementing not only the design it is paired with - be it modern pendant lighting , modern table lamp or contemporary wall light - but also the space surrounding it. To prevent your home from feeling dark and dreary or, even worse, clinical in its brightness, we asked our expert lighting team to share their tips and tricks for decorating with light bulbs.
Choose your light bulb according to the temperature of light your room requires. Filament style bulbs, be they a traditional incandescent or a modern LED design, emit a warmer glow that’s perfect for making a space cosy.
Apart from the obvious applications (functional spaces, spotlights and task lighting) brighter bulbs are more commonly used in diffused designs where the brightness of the bulb is softened to create a design feature.
When decorating the home, people often forget that the colour tone of a light bulb can change the whole ambience of a room. As bulbs range from warm to cold, always test your new paint colour with and without a light on to see how the tone changes.
If you’re looking to soften the glow of an energy efficient LED, choose a globe shaped bulb with a golden tint to create a more ambient light. The important point when judging the brightness of a light bulb is not be fooled by the watts. Instead look at the lumens. The higher the lumens the brighter the bulb will be.
More than a passing fad, shadeless designs have remained a permanent feature of contemporary lighting collections for a number of seasons. Taking their cue from industrial inspired spaces, they are the ideal way of showing off a decorative light bulb and adding a quirky focal point to a room.
A slender framed floor lamp will look striking with an oversized filament bulb, while an exposed bulb chandelier is the perfect counterpoint of traditional and cutting edge style. One of the joys of exposed light bulbs is how striking they look when clustered together.
Play around with a simple linear design over a kitchen counter or stagger them at varying heights in a stairwell for a statement lighting installation. Filament bulbs don’t always have to be the sole feature but can instead enhance a lamp design. Utilise them inside a pendant to achieve a completely different look without having to purchase a new piece.
Added to a glass pendant, the filament design will showcase the glass colour in finer detail, whilst a tinted light bulb will completely change the colour of a pendant, creating the perfect update to any room.
While we’ve all changed a light bulb or two, it’s easy to get your wires crossed when it comes to selecting the right type for your space. Different bulbs are suited to particular functions, with three main light bulb types to choose from:
Incandescent: the oldest and most common type, these traditional bulbs can switch to full brightness instantly and are also dimmable.
Fluorescent: energy efficient and affordable, this light bulb emits a bright but slightly cooler light that’s suited to diffused designs.
LED: the best of both worlds, LED bulbs bring together energy efficient technology and the decorative warmth of traditional designs. Another important thing to check before light bulb shopping is whether your light fitting supports a screw (E27, E14) or bayonet (B22) bulb.
So how many light bulbs does it take to change up your space? With a wider variety of shapes, sizes and finishes than ever before the answer is really up to you. Try our collection of traditional, decorative and energy efficient light bulbs to start creating your own unique lighting concept.
Finding the perfect Christmas presents is never easy, especially for those ‘particular people’ in your life.
This Christmas we’ve taken inspiration from our archive series of gift guides ‘Presents for Particular People’ giving the glamorous 1930s gift suggestions such as Bright Young People, the Bon Viveur and the Punctual Correspondent a 21st century update.
From secret Santa and stocking fillers to statement gifts for that special someone, our festive edit has Christmas covered. And to ensure yours is a seasonal soiree to remember, we’ve curated Christmas table settings, accessories and decorations that are certain to impress family and friends.
Presents for foodies
Great as last minute gifts or stocking fillers, our Christmas Food and Drink selection offers a range of delicious treats and tipples. Perfect for those with a taste for the finer things.
Presents for the home
Christmas comes but once a year, so whether you’re in search of perfect presents or gifts for your space, discover festive designs they’ll adore from our Home Accessories collection including our modern rugs, perfect for any lounge or bedroom.
Presents for her
Forget diamonds, when it comes to Christmas designers are a girl’s best friend. Treat the one you love to gifts she’ll adore this holiday or let her bask in her own beauty with our copper mirror.
Presents for him
What to get the man who has everything? This Christmas, discover debonair designs no gent should be without.
Discover seasonal scents
A subtle play on the senses, our festive fragrances are guaranteed winter warmers. Discover our seasonal scents Winter Spice and Frankincense & Pine, great as gifts or for creating an evocative ambiance in your home this Christmas.
Showstopping decorations
Throw out the tinsel and adorn your tree with these beautifully crafted decorations from the Original Winter's Tale. “These hand-blown decorations will bring texture and warmth to your Christmas tree.” Jo Bailey, Acting Style Director at Living Etc.
Impress your guests
Tis the season to celebrate! Dress your table with designer tableware and accessories for the perfect Christmas dinner party. “Candlelight paired with lustred glass is the perfect combination for a dazzling dining table.” Emily Rubner, Heal's Dining Buyer
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