The Most High-Maintenance Furniture You Should Avoid

When it comes to buying a new piece of furniture, appearance is important, but other factors to consider are durability, cost, and the amount of time and effort you’ll have to spend cleaning and maintaining it. Even if chairs, tables and sofas look great in stylish Instagram photos, that doesn’t mean they’ll look the same in your home when people actually use them every day.

Perhaps you enjoy the constant cleaning, fluffing, fussing and dusting required to keep your home tidy. If not, here are some examples of high-maintenance furniture items that you might want to avoid.

Furniture that requires special care and is best avoided

We’re not saying that all your furniture should be upholstered in brown, stain-resistant microfiber or covered in wipe-clean laminate. But if you don’t want to spend time caring for your furniture, you should think twice before investing in any of the following high-maintenance furniture items:

Wooden parts with complex carvings

Certain furniture styles, such as Victorian or French Provincial – both original pieces and reproductions from the 1970s and 1980s – are known for decorative carved wood pieces such as chairs, tables, desks and chests. Although these decorations look fancy, they are difficult to clean because dirt and dust tend to settle in all the nooks and crannies.

Instead : Consider choosing clean lines from Art Deco or mid-century modern furniture that still has a vintage look without the gaps.

Down sofas

There’s something about plush, down-filled sofas that just beckons you to curl up with a book and sink into its cushions. But there’s a downside to this attractive comfort: If you don’t fluff it up again every time someone sits down, it will constantly look deflated and disheveled.

Instead : Find a comfortable sofa with foam filling that looks like a cloud and springs back into shape when someone stands up.

Glass tables

Tables with glass tops can make a room feel open, airy, and elevated—at least until they become covered in fingerprints and smudges.

Instead : Desks with thinner tops and legs can still make a room feel less cramped than chunkier pieces of furniture that extend to the floor.