Square pegs, round holes – We have them both

Uno ottomans, now available round as well as square, continue to be among our most functional and versatile pieces.

Whether you employ them as TV-dinner trays or overflow seating, the Uno makes life easy, rolling smartly into position on casters and always looks good doing it.

We’ve been making these adorable little scamps for the past decade, and they continue to be crowd pleasers, especially since last year when we added the cylindrical version to go with the long-running cube.

 

A seat, a table, a stylish way to store your extra stuff…The beauty is that you can have it any way you like, and the top is an upholstered cushion or, flip it over, and it’s a tray table.

This assumption could be a shot in the dark, but we strongly suspect that the hidden storage under the lid is frequently a quick-and-easy catch-all for table clutter just before the guests arrive – at least, it is in our house.

We have seen that Uno’s work really well in pairs, and more than a few times, people have put four squares together to create a large and extremely versatile cocktail table. For measurements and more information, go here.

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Lean back and set a spell – and look good doing it

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it? American Leather’s Comfort Recliners provide infinite comfort while maintaining a room’s design integrity.

The age-old problem with the recliner is the married couple’s lament - he likes it because it’s comfortable, great for watching games, movies or for snoozing, and she objects to furniture with all the style and shape of a marshmallow man. To make matters worse, when the chair opens, the metal mechanism has all the charm of a medieval torture device.

Comfort Recliners are the solution to settle both sides of that argument. They sit just as comfortably as any recliner. In fact, because each style is available in four sizes and can be adjusted any number of ways, the Comfort Recliner provides a custom fit. Here’s how:

·      The height on the swivel version is adjustable from 19 inches seat height to a bit more than 21 inches.

·      The headrest pillow slides up or down and it can be tilted forward for optimum TV-viewing posture.

·      The footrest operates independently from the reclining back, allowing users to prop their feet up without leaning back – great for reading newspapers and magazines.

·      Infinitely adjustable. Set the footrest as high or low as you want it with our patented Comfort Release handle. The back operates intuitively. It goes back only as far as you want to lean back.

Just as important, they just look great. Open or closed.

Even when they are closed, the seven Comfort Recliner styles have more design panache than the typical recliner, but when they open – oh, my – that’s when they really sparkle. 

You see, the footrest is fully upholstered so there’s no comfort gap under your legs. This helps hide the mechanism, but even if you duck under the chair to look, you will see that the mechanism under the foot rest is entirely in a polished stainless-steel finished metal. It bears repeating: the Comfort Recliner looks great open or closed.

And you have tons of options to further customize your best seat in the house. Such as:

The swivel base is available upholstered with the same leather or fabric that the chair is covered in, or you can have it in metal with a stainless finish, or you can have it in wood with Espresso, Acorn or Walnut finish.

If you don’t need or want a swivel base, get it with wood legs in Espresso, Acorn or Walnut.

With the four distinct sizes, we have one to fit everyone from petite women to LARGE men.

Visit one of our Comfort Recliner gallery dealers to sit test this innovative new product.

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Resolved: A more beautiful, more comfortable home

Make a bold style statement for 2013!

Many of us have made promises to ourselves pledging to be better, healthier people in 2013. At the same time, quite a few of us are also looking to give that same sort of attention and effort to our homes.

It makes sense: We’ve enjoyed some free time at home, often with holiday guests, and attended parties at the homes of friends and relatives. All this socializing helps us see what’s right and what’s not so right about our homes. It also helps that the visits to our friends have exposed us to new ideas in colors, design or furnishings.

Perhaps we don’t make home-décor resolutions with the same solemnity that we use when we pledge to eat less and exercise more, but most of us recognize that a more attractive and comfortable home cannot hurt our pursuit of inner peace and calm.

So, knowing that January has always been a big month for redecorating – whether because of New Year’s resolutions or just because folks want to spruce up for the Super Bowl, we would like to offer a few suggestions.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew: Work one room at a time. Make a priority list and try to make orderly progress. Nothing’s more discouraging than starting too many projects at once and never really finishing any of them.

Remember that a redo can be almost effective as an overhaul: A new paint color, a few new accent pieces, or a new arrangement of your furniture can refresh a room nearly as well as if you renovated everything.

Put the strongest accent on comfort: American Leather has built its business with great style and innovative design, but underneath it all, we know that we can never lose sight of the comfort imperative. As you consider new furnishings or new room arrangements, always ask yourself: Is it comfortable?

Have fun with colors and style, but always keep it comfortable.

Be fresh and have fun: For some adventurous souls, this advice is unnecessary, but many among us are quite cautious about taking style risks. Still, we believe the use of vibrant colors and style makes a room more beautiful and more comfortable. If you aren’t sure what works, there are tremendous resources available in the form of design professionals, books and the web. Don’t forget to follow us on Pinterest for a bit extra inspiration, http://pinterest.com/americanleather.

Don’t forget the most important rule, have fun!

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Tis the season ...

I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday -- the longer, the better -- from the great boarding school where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest.

 -- Charles Dickens

The American Leather factory will be closed next week. This is the way we do it in the furniture industry, rather than try to limp along for a week with a skeleton crew, everybody stays home for a week (except for some office staff who are available to answer the phones).

We do the same thing for the week of July 4^th.  It’s a nice way to let everyone know we put a priority on strong families and happy team members. Nothing is more important.

As we all make those frantic final efforts to tie up all the loose ends at work while simultaneously finishing preparations for the holidays, now might be a good time to suggest that we all take a few deep breaths to relax and remember the simpler things in life.

Remember that the best moments have little to do with whether your pies came out perfect, or if your gifts were exactly what they needed. More important, we urge you to relax and take the time to surround yourself in the company of people who know and love you. That, after all, is what it’s all about.

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Color of the year is a real gem: Emerald Green

Pantone’s crowned Emerald as the color that will rise to prominence in 2013, and we think it’s going to be a real gem.

We’re pretty jazzed about Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2013. Besides the fact that it ties in so nicely with Christmas and the holidays, Emerald Green – specifically Pantone 17-5641 – works really well with our palette of fabrics and leathers.

Jessica Green, our Merchandising Manager, tells us that Emerald is extremely versatile and will probably be used most frequently in home furnishings as a finishing touch, “a crowning jewel.”

It should be an appealing compliment to neutral tones, Jessica said: “This soft tone will pair great with our gray spectrum (which is becoming more and more important and slowly overtaking the neutrals) and will spice up warmer neutrals in the cream and beige families. It will look fresh with white and khaki/caramel, a little edgy with black.”

We like that Emerald moves away from deeper, more traditional green and has softer, bluish undertones that allow it to be a chameleon. Jessica also added that “It will be able to work with bright, deep pinks and electric blues, strengthening the vibrancy of saturated palettes with a European sensibility.”

Pantone, which provides color standards for the design industries, makes its annual color forecast based on trends in a number of industries including home fashions, as well as beauty, fashion, entertainment, art, technology and sports. Succeeding Tangerine Tango, 2012’s color of the year, Emerald was selected since it is expected to rise in prominence, in fashion, beauty, interiors, print and graphic design over the coming twelve months.

Describing Emerald as “sophisticated and luxurious,” the Pantone announcement says, this luminous, magnificent hue has been the color of beauty and new life in many cultures and religions. It’s also the color of growth, renewal and prosperity – no other color conveys regeneration more than green. For centuries, many countries have chosen green represent healing and unity.”

Now, we can’t say with complete confidence that Emerald Green is going to bring us world or even inner harmony and enlightenment, but are looking forward to seeing how our designers put it to work to create beautiful homes and inviting rooms.

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Conversectionals and other ruminations on seating options

Limitless configurations, more seating capacity and comfortable conversations are just some of the reasons why sectionals are so popular.

Home styling is so much more eclectic these days, and most of us no longer feel that our furnishings have to “match.” Creative designers now want to create coordinated rooms where all the elements work together, where the colors, shapes and proportions are complimentary but not necessarily identical.

Certainly, we in the furniture industry have seen an overwhelming trend toward item buying and away from what we used to call suites (pronounced like suits) of furniture, with each piece in the same finish and the same style. The old days of building a room around a sofa-loveseat-chair combination are long gone.

Each of these key items – sofa, loveseat, chair and even matching ottoman – still play an important role in furnishing beautiful and comfortable rooms. But we’ve seen a powerful move toward sectionals, especially as decorating “rules” relax and more emphasis is placed on casual lifestyles.

Obviously, a sectional can be designed to provide more seating, often in less space than standalone pieces. Because most of our collections include armless pieces, we can build sectionals to go around the wall and down the hall. We can even pave a room with an endless sectional if that’s what somebody really wants.

But sectionals can also be quite small. For instance, in a cramped space, a sectional could be set up with a one-armed loveseat at one end and a one-armed chair with a corner piece in the center. This would give more seating capacity in less space than a loveseat-chair combination, but the overall footprint of the configuration is quite small.

This small Malibu sectional provides more seating in less space than two free-standing pieces.

Sectionals are social. People tend to sit a little closer and are in a more relaxed posture. That’s one reason we’ve always loved what we call our wedge sectionals: two pieces that each have 22.5-degree angle. This is a great configuration for watching television – everybody’s seat is oriented toward the screen – but it’s also an intimate set-up for sitting and talking.

A “wedge” sectional is an excellent choice for both conversation and TV watching.

And sectionals can quite dramatic, too. At the High Point furniture market, we regularly show an armless sofa bracketed by chaises. Matched with an ottoman, this creates something akin to a pit group, even if you don't have to dive into it. But there's plenty of room for lounging, sprawling or whatever word you want to use for leaning back and relaxing.

We've always loved this configuration, with a chaise on either end of an armless sofa. This is the Grant, but you can do this with just about any of our sofa collections.

Here are a couple more of our favorites:

If space isn't an issue, this 10-piece Menlo Park layout ought to make a dramatic statement.

A one-armed sofa with a return, a simple sectional, from our Astoria Park collection.

More drama: The Corbin's unusual arm placement creates a sofa with two sides for sitting.

Have fun! Create the sectional that has the style, shape and seating capacity that's perfect for your room.

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Recylcing: It's the right thing to do.

America Recycles Day is an annual reminder that we all need to do what we can to reduce waste by reusing and recycling.

Technically, we're a day late on this one, but in the theme of yesterday's America Recycles Day, we have decided to reuse the theme, hereby naming Friday, Nov. 16, America Recycles Day Redux. This is an idea that is easy for American Leather to get behind because we reuse and recycle everything. No matter what it is -- wood, leather, foam or hardware -- if we can't find a use for it, we find someone who can. This is the way we've always run our factory, which regularly astounds first-time visitors for its clean and orderly condition.

But enough about American Leather. This is about what we all can do to reduce waste by recycling. This site for America Recycles Day offers several good ideas for recycling programs large and small, but it's all just a lot of talk -- much of it recycled (get it?) -- until we make it a regular practice. The hardest part is just getting started, setting up a system for separating recyclables from the stuff that is legitimate garbage. Once you have that organized, it's simply a matter of putting the plastic bottles and metal cans where they belong, rather than dumping it all into the garbage can.

Unfortunately, some of us are unwilling to make recycling a habit, as though it's a political statement or an undesirable style pose to be doing something that is environmentally smart. It's a shame that these attitudes exist. In the hopes that these words will wind up in front of some folks who heretofore had resisted recycling, consider this from the America Recycles Day website:


Recycling is the easiest thing we all can do 365 days a year to save energy, conserve natural resources and create green jobs.
• Our national recycling rate of 34 percent:
— Saves the energy equivalent of nearly 229 million barrels of crude oil or nearly
20 days of all U.S. oil imports.
— Saves Americans the equivalent of the annual energy consumption of nearly 
14 million US households per year.
— Avoids greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions equivalent to removing more than 
36 million cars from the road each year, or growing nearly 5 billion tree 
seedlings for 10 years.
• Recycling is a multibillion dollar industry that employs millions of Americans and 
helps advance our clean energy economy.

So in a nutshell, when you recycle, you are a Maker, not a Taker. In fact, you will be a Job Creator. And as we all now know, those are good things. So let's get with it. Let's recycle.

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