Sofas & Chairs

A seat for the sala is built differently from one for the table:

it sits lower and deeper and leans back, because nobody eats from it. Sofas and juegos de sala are in sofas, and single seats, recliners and rocking chairs in armchairs. A dining chair is the upright one. Its seat should sit about 30 cm below the tabletop, which on a standard 75 cm table means a seat around 45 cm high, and nothing on it adjusts. Those are in dining chairs, a click away from tables if you are matching the two. Office chairs are the only seats built to adjust, on a gas lift and casters, the right buy for someone at a desk for hours rather than through a meal.

The word sillón on a Costa Rican listing:

does not settle what the seat is. Plenty of sellers call a sofa a sillón, and others use it for a seat for one, so a “juego de sillones 3-2” is a three-seater with a love seat and a “sillón reclinable triple” is a reclining sofa for three. Search with both words, then go straight to the number of plazas and the width in centimetres: a single seat rarely passes a metre across, and a three-seater is nearer two. If a listing gives neither, ask before you go to see it.

The mecedora de cuero, the rocking chair that folds:

is the Costa Rican seat with no imported equivalent: a frame in caobilla or a similar hardwood, with leather stretched across the seat and back and often tooled with a design or a name. Folded, it closes to a slab about 35 cm thick, so a pair travels in an ordinary car. The leather is the part that wears. Over the years it stretches until the seat sags, darkens where arms and heads rest, and can split where it meets the wood. That is fixable: replacement leather sets are made for these chairs, so a sound frame with tired leather only needs new leather. On a used one, fold and unfold it twice, rock it on a level floor to see that both runners touch evenly, and look along each runner for cracks across the grain.

Leather against cuerina on a used chair:

is worth settling before price comes up, because the two age in opposite ways. Real leather creases and darkens, and with cleaning and conditioning it lasts decades. Cuerina, the synthetic imitation on most factory-made seating, looks much the same when new, then cracks and flakes in patches, and once that starts the only repair is re-covering. Look at a cut edge or the underside: cuerina shows a woven fabric backing, leather a rough, fibrous one. Press a thumb in as well: leather wrinkles softly around it and recovers; cuerina dimples like plastic. The first flakes appear on the arms and the front edge of the seat, so a throw draped over either is worth lifting.

The seat you are selling, called by its proper name:

starts in the title, in the words a buyer types. Write sofá de tres plazas or sillón individual rather than just sillón. Then give the width and depth, say honestly whether it is leather or cuerina and, for a set, how many pieces there are and whether they all match. Photograph it in daylight from the front and the side, plus one close shot of the arms and seat edge, where wear shows first. Photograph a rocker folded too, which answers the transport question before anyone asks it. People with seating to pass on are usually swapping rather than emptying a house: the couple who moved up to a sala esquinera and kept the old 3-2, the office that changed its desk chairs and has a row of the previous ones. And a buyer driving in from Ciudad Quesada for a pair of rockers will ask two things before setting off: whether they fold, and whether the leather is the original.