In the launch issue of Dirty Furniture: Couch (London), the team look at the price tag of haunted furniture, the sofa’s role in genetic surveillance and the peculiar phenomenon of Channel 4 TV programme Gogglebox. Features include design historian Penny Sparke on the history of comfort, architect Sam Jacob on the role of the sofa in sit-coms and emerging writer Natalie Ferris on women lying down. Artist Jeremy Millar takes the covers off Freud’s couch; novelist Will Wiles scrutinises Tony Blair’s so-called ‘sofa politics’, and we speak to the world’s best designers about what they live with. Foam comes under the spotlight in a materials focus by technology writer Joanne McNeil, manufacturing approaches are questioned and we interview the often over-looked and forgotten: a couch-surfer, an upholsterer and an antique dealer. Edited by Elizabeth Glickfeld, Anna Bates and Peter Maxwell, Dirty Furniture takes a lateral approach to writing about design and showcases the work of the best contemporary writers on design. Released biannually and conceived as a finite series of six — designed by Sara De Bondt studio — each issue takes a piece of furniture as its theme and uses it as a springboard to explore topics spanning politics, design, history, technology, psychology, manufacturing — and the plain weird. Future issues of Dirty Furniture will be: Table, Toilet, Closet, Telephone and Bed.

144 pages, 16.7 x 23cm, softcover, Dirty Furniture (London).