Cushions & Pillows

A cushion on the sofa is not a pillow on the bed:

and neither is the foam pad on a terrace chair. A throw cushion is a cover and an insert, sold together or apart: square ones for the sofa, a long lumbar one across a bed, a big floor cushion or pouf for a living room that is short of chairs. A sofa looks fuller when the insert is a size bigger than the cover rather than an exact match. Bed pillows come in standard, queen and king lengths, filled with polyester fibre or shaped from memory foam. Seat pads are blocks of foam in a zipped cover, cut for a dining chair, a wicker armchair or a terrace sofa, and they belong on the furniture they were made for. A floor cushion wants something from rugs underneath it, and a set of sofa cushions usually gets chosen against whatever hangs at the window, from curtains and blinds.

Memory foam in Huehuetenango, fibre in Retalhuleu:

the climate of the bedroom matters more than the label on the pillow. Memory foam softens with warmth and stiffens in the cold, so in a highland bedroom that turns icy before dawn it feels hard for the first minutes, and down in the Pacific lowlands it holds the heat of your head all night. Fibre pillows breathe better and cost less, but they flatten sooner and need plumping. For terrace cushions, ask what the cover is made of before you look at the colour: solution-dyed acrylic such as Sunbrella keeps its colour in hard sun, while printed polyester bleaches far sooner.

What a sofa cushion and a foam pillow are worth:

a plain decorative cushion with its insert is about Q70 to Q160 new, so a used one is up against a cheap new one and earns its price through the cover: heavy velvet, a handmade fabric, or a matched set of four that would be hard to put together again. A memory foam bed pillow runs from just under Q200 to about Q550 new. Once it has been slept on it keeps very little of that, because few people want a stranger’s pillow, while one still sealed in its bag, often a spare that came with a new mattress, holds most of its price.

What a squeeze and an open zip tell you about a used cushion:

more than any photo. Fold a fibre pillow or insert in half: if it stays folded instead of springing open, the fill has collapsed and the cover is all you are getting. Yellowed memory foam is only age; foam that crumbles at the edges or keeps a dent is finished. Unzip the cover and smell the insert, because damp, cigarette smoke and pets stay in foam long after the cover has been washed. Cushions from a beach house in Monterrico or Puerto San José need a closer look. Press the foam hard: if water comes up, or the inside shows grey or black spots, mildew has got in and washing the cover will not fix it. Compare the top of each pad with the side that faced the chair to see how much the sun has taken, and run the zips, since metal ones corrode in salt air.

Photographing a cushion set with one cover unzipped:

that shot shows the insert, which is the one thing a buyer cannot judge from a picture of the sofa. Measure the cover and the insert separately, say what the fill is, and say whether the covers come off for washing. For outdoor pads, name the furniture they came off and give the thickness, because the person looking for replacements has the same chairs at home. Mention pets or smokers in the house up front. Bed pillows are worth listing only new or sealed, with the bag in the photo. Someone driving down from the capital to a house on the coast will want to know the foam is dry, so say where the cushions were stored through the rainy season.