Using cushion and upholstery to add decorative embellishment and comfort to a room dates back to middle age, when cushions were placed on the floor for the ladies of the household to sit on, while the men sat on hard wooden seats. The loose cushion had its heyday prior to the invention of modern methods of upholstering sofas and chairs. During the sixteenth century, wooden seats were given a flat squab cushion, while from the seventeenth century onward, tie on squabs were used on English and later French, cane seated dining chairs, Swedish Gustavian style furniture, and rush seated Dutch chairs. Use squab cushions to add comfort and style to plain wooden seating they are ideal for embellishing chairs that are not used every day. In seeking to make beds and seat furniture more comfortable, eighteenth century upholstering even invented air cushions, firstly out of pigs bladders and subsequently of oiled leather, and by 1842, India rubber air cuhions were being manufactured.

Use carefully chosen cushions in a purely decorative way to suggest a particular traditional style using appropriate fabrics and trimming. Improvements in seat springing and the general use of thick upholstery in the nineteenth century allowed cushions to be included as a solely decorative addition. The decorative merits of cushions have always been recognized. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tapestry work, damask, and velvet panel cushions, ornamented with elaborate trimmings such as gold threaded braid and heavy corner tassels, were included in decorative schemes as a sign of wealth and status. You could use any of these styles to create added decorative focus and sumptuous comfort within a period style room.

Antique tapestry cushions have become very popular and also expensive in recent years, but these are also many woven materials available that cleverly imitate needlepoint as well as weaves in the style of Aubusson and Savonnerie rugs.

Panels of antique lace can be stitched into ordinary pillow cases or mounted on a backing material which could either be white or coloured, to show off the intricate work. Choose a backing fabric that echoes another colour in the room. Lace in particularly appropriate for the bedroom, and a bed piled up with a variety of lace cushions and pillow looks sumptuous and comfortable.

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