Welcome to Is This Available? by Dana and Maria, our weekly blast about something we find on Facebook Marketplace.
New York, New York
Couch culture can seem debilitatingly, aggravatingly, inexplicably cursed to the degree that even the best of us (read: your favorite camp counselor, Diana Taurasi, Brian Jordan Alvarez etc.) feel like bamboozled patrons who paid to ride the Coney Island Soarin’ Eagle death trap. Shopping for a sofa is HARD. It’s MANIPULATIVE. They’re BULKY. EXPENSIVE. And there are SO MANY OPTIONS.
A household name, and a couch that will never seduce me is the Mario Bellini. This used one is $2,300 and is known as the Camaleonda Sofa. I think it looks like wet popcorn and all the cottage cheese you freaks are eating. The current trendy equivalent Bellini is the cloud couch from Restoration Hardware (see right), and it also looks like something that’s not supposed to be wet…like popcorn.
Unless you have 15+ foot ceilings and/or enough square footage for your couch to float off the wall, Bellini and RH couches look like garbage bean bags after 6+ months of use. TuffyTheWolf said it best:
Sit on it once and it sucks? Bad couch. My parents have had a great couch for over 10+ years and while it’s not timeless at least it’s not paper thin, sad, and squishy. I love dissing these bad couches but I still have no idea what a perfect couch is. Maybe a perfect couch doesn’t exist. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, check out this stuff Mario Bellini designed that aren’t flops.
The Divisumma 18 Calculator (1973)
Fuji DL 100 (1983)
Lancia Trevi Dashboard (1979)
The European Patent Office in Holland (2004)
The Sheikh Zayed National Museum International Competition in Abu Dhabi (2007, not built)
Maria’s miss of the week: I am going to sit on the couch and watch this tv until I can watch the Barbie movie on it.