At Casco Bay Furniture, we are often asked about the history of the Chesterfield sofa. Here is a bit of that history.

The word “Chesterfield” is a term used today by many in North American and particularly in Canada to describe what most of us commonly refer to as a sofa. But the term has much older origins. It is generally thought that the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Lord Philip Stanford, who lived from 1694 to 1773 and died at the age of 79, commissioned his furniture maker to build a leather sofa that would not wrinkle the clothes of a gentlemen sitting upright, but in comfort.