When a Pouf Is Not Just a Pouf
What we can find in the quiet, unglamorous corners of existence.
It turns out that I’m at the age where I can spend hours on a Saturday night shopping for a pouf. At first, I thought I was searching for ottomans, but what I was really looking for was a good pouf. According to an explainer on Real Simple, "Ottomans are almost always firmer and less pillowy, whereas some poufs are more like oversized pillows than anything else."
Oversized pillows? Say less.
Truly, I would love nothing more than a pillowy existence right now. If I imagine a great evening, it will look something like this illustration of field mice curled up in a quilt. Everything I'm drawn to these days seems to come in curves—round mugs, puffy sweaters, my favorite cream-filled buns from the Japanese bakery, and my own body, devoted to its annual acquisition of winter padding. Sharp angles can take a hike. I want to sink into all the comfort corners.
And my new pouf will allow me to do just that. I’m sure of it.
The Unstylish and Beloved
Recently, I took a picture of my reading corner in our bedroom for Instagram. There’s absolutely nothing aspirational about it. The decade-old chair is a blocky, ivory-colored monstrosity that bears a Rorschach-like apple juice stain. The floor lamp teeters unevenly. But, boy, am I lucky to have a space to call my own. My corner is next to a window, through which I can see the neighbor kids scooting by or the slow drizzle of rain. A few feet away, there’s a portable fireplace that emits friendly heat and some kitschy-yet-endearing LED flames. And there’s my fuzzy, brown blanket.
Earlier this month, I pulled the blanket out of our linen closet and draped it onto the chair, though it doesn’t really match anything.
Upon seeing the blanket, my husband said, “I thought we got rid of that old thing.”
Maybe he would have—though he is not terribly profligate himself—had I not rescued it, like a scraggly little stray. That blanket means something to me. We’d used it throughout our winters in Chicago, then in five homes sprinkled throughout Ohio, and even in Texas during the rare nights when the temperatures sank below fifty degrees. It reminds me of a bearskin, even if it’s nothing more than a synthetic recreation of fur-lined comfort.
Completing Your Cozy
I once worked at a company that sold high-end furniture. My job was to write the product descriptions, a task the founder took very seriously, having interviewed me personally for the role. “We have to tell a story,” he insisted. A couch was never a couch; we called it a sofa. We avoided the word “factory” and referred to the furniture makers as artisans. I traced the history of each chair, table, and lamp, down to the provenance of the forests where the wood was grown. I took such pleasure in the romance of furniture design and eagerly chased each new trend (Art Deco to industrial chic to beigey-beige harmony).
After that job, I continued working at design-adjacent companies. The making of a home has always mattered to me, though I usually opted for the quick-hit satisfaction of that “Add to Cart” button over the thoughtful acquisition I admired in other homes. But what I noticed was that many in the design content community seemed to overuse the word “curated,” to the point that it lacked the intended meaning. I have a slight aversion to the word now. It’s not that I don’t believe in selecting your belongings with care. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if the word has been co-opted to celebrate access and privilege, as well as our insatiable desire to optimize our lives through capitalism.
I’m not immune, clearly. I just spent hours deliberating over a pouf that I was convinced would “complete my cozy.”
Thankfully, these days, I see a turn in home design. From my amateur standpoint, it seems people are leaning into the messy, the worn, the artfully lived in. Curated doesn’t seem to matter as much; or at least, not the corporate definitions of the word, focused as they are on polished, clean-lined, homogenous style. Maybe it’s because our collective appetite for cozy has grown. From #cottagecore images plastered on social media, to a proliferation of sherpa-lined everything, to the insistent call to “romanticize your life,” I see a new fixation with the quiet, everyday rituals of life. Whistling tea kettles, a swing on the porch. Solitude, performed en masse.
Maybe we can attribute this settling-in to the advent of fall, rife as it is with cable-knit sweaters and steaming mugs, but I sense something broader. To me, it feels like we’re collectively yearning for a hearth fire, whether it be literal or metaphorical. Because what the word “cozy” really suggests is a sense of physical and emotional safety. I suspect, in this time of great unease, that we are holding onto safe spaces more than ever. To be cozy is to have found a spot to land. A shelter from the storms.
So now, I’m paying attention to what it means to fold inward. To withdraw. Maybe in the silence, huddled in our worn blankets, feet propped on a pouf that promises hours of rest, we’ll finally have the space to figure out what comes next.