What You Should Know About Our Kingsbridge Tufted Sofa

The Kensington Tufted Sofa is a classic Chesterfield design made popular by several Catalog Companies. Compare our Kingsbridge Leather Sofa to the Restoration Hardware’s Kensington Leather Sofa,  the Arhaus Wessex Leather Sofa, Pottery Barn’s Leather Chesterfield and other tufted leather sofas. Our version of this sofa, the Kingsbridge is handcrafted in a state of the art manufacturing facility in Taylorsville, North Carolina. It is manufactured by Jonathan Wesley Furniture. The owner of our factory Tim Shook and his uncle, Norm Shook founded a company in the early 70’s called Taylor King Furniture, considered to be one of the premier upholstery manufacturers in the industry. They later sold Taylor King to Hancock and Moore. After the sale Tim continued on as the plant Manger for Taylor King , eventually leaving and reopening as Jonathan Wesley Furniture. Coincidentally Tim’s brother replaced Tim as the plant manger for Taylor King. Several of Tim’s upholsterers joined him at Jonathan Wesley. As you can see from this little bit of history, our factory owner has been making high quality upholstered furniture for 43 years.

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.