Yes, the store is really called Couch Potatoes. And yes, this post is about a couch — the olive green one holding court in the Found & Kept portrait. It is the stage everything else sat on tonight, so it gets the first post. Apartment life meant choosing carefully, because every piece has to earn its place. There are couches everywhere you look, but nothing we sat on touched this one for build quality — and we expect to be sitting on it for years to come.
Most of the collections are named for Austin itself, and the roll call is a little tour of the city: Austonian, Bonnell, Bouldin, Cedar Park, Cherrywood, Domain, Ladybird, Lamar, Manor, Menchaca, Parmer, Rainey, Red River and Sunset Valley. The Fluffy is the exception, named for a person and not a place, which fits a cloud. Our hunt ran through the map. The Fluffy came first. The SoCo, named for South Congress, came next. We landed on the Lago Vista, named for the lakeside town on Lake Travis, in Elliot Avocado. Couch Potatoes rates firmness from 1 to 5: the Fluffy is a 1, the SoCo is a 2 and the Lago Vista is a 3 — right in the middle, and the best compromise we sat on. Texas-sized did the rest. If you go sit on them, and you should, that little scale does the deciding in about ten minutes: sink, settle or sit up proper.
Fluffy
SoCo
The Lago Vista easily converts to a generous sleepover surface by removing the back cushions and pillows — slightly wider than a twin and a hair shorter. This is the part nobody puts in a love letter, so here it is plainly: everybody needs a couch. It is where the day lands, where guests sleep and where life actually happens in a small home. Ours just happens to do all of it beautifully.
Couch Potatoes builds in its own Austin factory, and most pieces are made to order — pick your size, your shape and your fabric from more than a hundred options, then give them the time to build it right. They keep ready pieces on the floor too, for anyone whose couch situation cannot wait for someday. This thing is solid — well made has a weight to it. Couch Potatoes stands behind what it builds. Our guarantee runs the other way: guests become couch potatoes on it — removal not covered, and we are not responsible for roots growing or the cost of twelve men and a truck to move them both. And the building offered no shortcuts: there is no easy elevator route to our door, just a freight elevator that lands you a flight of stairs away whichever way you come. It is the same route the two of us carried everything up from the parking garage, trip after trip, when we moved in.
Now it anchors the room, hosts the tea tray and the fruitcake and one very patient photo shoot and baked potato photo shoots — and it is not moving again for anybody. And when we move again, it's ten men and a truck.
And because a couch this loved accumulates paperwork, the bylaws and the guest report card get their own airing on the podcast.
Consider this our love letter to Austin Couch Potatoes.
Find your own: Couch Potatoes builds to order in Austin, Texas — couchpotatoes.com. Two showrooms, and the big floor up by IH 35 is the one to sit your way through. The sitting is free.
