Loveseat With Chaise or Loveseat Chaise?

A loveseat with chaise is, in humble opinioin, one of the finest pieces of hybridized furniture to have come along in the last fifty years. Of course, you may have noticed by now that I lean (and when I say lean I really mean recline deeply) toward the lounge-esque, and heavily favor the fluffy (f’sho). So I’ll grant that I may be a bit biased in favor of a laid-back loveseat, aka a chaise-lover-not-a-fighter-lounge. And because I’m also a big fan of portmanteaux, I’m desperately fighting the urge to bust out with a fun new nickname like “the laise” or “the choveseat” here (but don’t worry – I would never do that to you 🙂

Which is it really – loveseat with chaise or loveseat chaise? Or are they the same thing? None of the furniture retailers seem to know or care – on nearly every furniture website, a search for either of the two terms will serve up results showing both. And I wish I could tell you that the furniture industry bigwigs and design honchos had found all this ambiguity too chaotic and bad for business and had issued edicts as to the precise classification of this lovely love-lounge hybrid, but that declaration has yet to come. So, in lieu of an authoritative furniture taxonomy delivered from on high, we’re just going to have to blaze our own trail my friends, which is what I just how I like it anway.

Some Folks Say Loveseat With Chaise

Every once in a while however, you get a curmudgeonly type who will swear on their mother’s favorite davenport that a loveseat chaise is as different from a loveseat with chaise as night is from day: “and they won’t never meet in the twain”, they say (the ‘twain’, according to the these types, is the crack between the loveseat cushions that all your valuables disappear into, which at least proves they aren’t complete nincompoops). These folks say that a loveseat with chaise is what you see pictured above, three butts wide or bust, with a chaise lounge attached to one side of an already-complete loveseat.

Some Folks Say Loveseat Chaise

And then on the other hand, they say, the loveseat chaise (as pictured below), is strictly a two-seater, with one seat of the love extended forward lounge-like to make it extra love-y. But I say, and this is a big butt, I say these folks are telling tales out of school. I say that the online furniture retailers are calling them what the people are calling them (because they know that’s how to show up in the search results)(yeah!). So I say the people have spoken (yeah!!): we don’t need no bigwigs from uptown and honchos from out-of-town telling us what to call our choveseats!…. Right?…. Right guys? Can I get another “yeah”?

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Some folks, the ones that like to hog both sides of a two-seater, the ones that splay out all spread-eagled across a queen mattress – you know the ones – these folks will even go so far as to take the love out of the name altogether and just call it a chaise and a half. Now I dodn’t want to sound judgmental (wait for it), but that’s just plain cuckoo-pants (and that, my friends, is how negation works 🙂 But in earnestness – and in keeping with that whole ‘the people’ thing I was so excited about such a long a minute ago – there’s a beauty in the mix-up of names and things here. If you can handle the uncertainty, living room furniture vernaculars are as myriad as the types of people that live in them. And if the Fluff Daddy Chair isn’t a perfect example of that, I don’t know what is.

In Chaise You Didn’t Know…

…this whole time, what the heck I was talking about when I said chaise: a chaise lounge is a chair with a forward extension to support your legs. It’s designed for reclining or lounging, and the ones with armrests on both sides are notoriously difficult to climb into and out of (there’s a lot of scooching involved).

If I haven’t made this point abundantly clear by now, let me say it more time: the beauty of the loveseat chaise is that there are as many flavors of seat as there are names to call it by. Whether you’re dreaming of a left-handed three-seater loveseat chaise or a right-handed double-rump loveseat with chaise, or to make it extra spicy maybe you want to pull a double-handed chaise loveseat twist from somewhere up your sleeve… and then blow my mind by telling me it’s a sleeper too… I’d have to tell you that it’s your lucky day – there’s one out there with your name on it.

And then, because I’ve learned this particular lesson many times over the years, I will put an end to the festivities while we’re all still having fun, and leave you with one last kernel of wisdom. Remember kids:

If You Really Loveseat Them, Don’t Chaise Them