Wool is breathable, resilient, renewable, naturally flame-resistant and cleverer than most synthetic sofa stuffings by some distance. Here’s why this ancient natural fibre belongs inside a real sofa…
Imagine you were asked to invent a miracle material for the future….
It would need to breathe, but also insulate. It would need to absorb moisture without feeling wet. It would have to be soft, springy, renewable, biodegradable and naturally resistant to flame. Ideally, it would regulate temperature, resist odours, last for years, and grow back after you’d harvested it.
A team of material scientists might spend decades and several billion pounds trying to create such a thing. But guess what… Sheep got there first!
Wool is one of the great natural materials, and considerably more sophisticated than the synthetic stuff that has replaced it in so much modern furniture making.
And yet, somehow, this extraordinary fibre – breathable, resilient, renewable, naturally flame-resistant and beautifully suited to upholstery – has largely been pushed aside by the modern sofa industry in favour of synthetic foams, polyester fibres and dacron. Or in other words, plastic.
At Schplendid, we think this is completely mad.
So we use wool inside our sofas, layered with coconut husk and cotton over our traditional springs. True, it is more expensive, more fiddly and less convenient than rolling out a sheet of synthetic fibre. But it is also a much better material.
This is our guide to wool: where it comes from, why it works, and why we think it belongs inside a real sofa.
A short history of wool
Wool has been with us for a very long time. Humans began domesticating sheep thousands of years ago, originally for meat and milk, and then increasingly for fleece. Once we had worked out that sheep could provide a renewable supply of warm, useful fibre without being killed, wool became one of the great materials of civilisation.
It clothed shepherds, soldiers, monks, kings, sailors, and schoolchildren. It made blankets, cloaks, sails, rugs, mattresses and upholstery. It helped build fortunes and towns. In medieval England, wool was a major national industry. If you visit old churches near our workshop in the Cotswolds (or in East Anglia or parts of Yorkshire), you will still find the evidence: grand “wool churches” built on the wealth of the fleece trade.
Today, the picture is rather different. British wool is often undervalued. In some cases, the price a farmer receives for fleece barely covers the cost of shearing. Which is a strange state of affairs, given that wool remains one of the most useful natural materials on earth.
But that, in a way, is the modern problem. We have become very good at making cheap synthetic substitutes for things that nature has already solved beautifully.
What is wool, anyway?
Wool is the natural fleece grown by sheep. At a microscopic level, it is a protein fibre, mainly made of keratin – the same family of tough natural proteins found in hair, feathers, claws and nails.
But unlike straight hair, wool fibres have a distinctive and very useful structure. A wool fibre has tiny overlapping scales on the outside, a complex internal structure, and a natural waviness known as crimp. That crimp helps wool hold air, which is why it insulates so well. It also gives wool its natural bounce and resilience.
Wool fibres can trap air as well as absorb and release moisture. They interlock, resist creasing and can be spun, felted or woven.
The point being, wool is not simply “soft stuff”: it is a tiny, highly engineered natural spring. No petrochemical plant required!
Lanolin: the sheep’s own protective polish
Fresh sheep’s wool contains lanolin, a natural waxy substance produced by the sheep’s skin.
Lanolin helps protect the fleece and the animal beneath it. It makes raw wool water-resistant, helps repel dirt, and gives newly shorn fleece that distinctive sheepy richness.
It is also the reason wool has long been associated with skincare, balms and ointments. If you have ever used a traditional hand cream for cracked skin, there is a fair chance lanolin has been involved somewhere.
Much of the lanolin is removed when wool is washed and processed. This is a good thing if you are planning to put the wool inside a sofa rather than live in a barn. But the presence of lanolin in raw fleece is part of wool’s wider story: this is a fibre designed by nature to protect, regulate and endure.
Wool breathes and regulates temperature
One of wool’s great talents is breathability.
Synthetic foams and fibres can feel hot, clammy or dead because they do not handle moisture and air in the same way. Wool, by contrast, can absorb moisture vapour and release it again. It helps create a more comfortable little microclimate around the body.
It’s a great feature for bedding and clothes: wool blankets can feel warm without being sweaty and woolly jumpers can insulate in the cold, but still feel breathable.
And it’s splendid for sofas too: a sofa made with natural, breathable layers really does feel different from one built around a sealed block of foam and plastic fibre. It feels somehow more ‘alive’ and certainly much more temperate than one of those padded plastic sandwiches.
Wool’s breathability is closely connected to its ability to regulate temperature. Because wool fibres are crimped, they trap air, which is a brilliant insulator.
The clever thing is that wool can help keep you warm when it is cold and more comfortable when it is warm. It is not magic, although it occasionally behaves like it. It’s physics, and it comes from a few thousand years of sheep standing around on windy hillsides.
For upholstery, this makes wool a particularly appealing layer. It adds softness and comfort without creating the dead, sweaty feel you can get from synthetic padding.
Wool is naturally resilient
A sofa takes a lot of punishment, what with all that sitting, sprawling, bouncing and so on. The materials inside a sofa need to be able to recover.
Wool is naturally resilient because of the crimp in its fibres. When compressed, those fibres have an ability to spring back. That does not mean wool is indestructible, or that it behaves like steel, or that it will never flatten. But compared with many synthetic fibres used in modern upholstery, wool has a beautiful natural liveliness.
This is one reason we like it as a top upholstery layer. Coconut husk gives structure, support and breathability,, while wool and cotton add a softer, more yielding finish over the top.
Wool and fire
Wool is also naturally flame-resistant – one of its most remarkable properties. Wool does not melt like many synthetic fibres. It is harder to ignite than cotton or polyester, and when exposed to flame it tends to char rather than drip or melt.
Now, it is important to be clear. Modern British upholstery still has to meet fire regulations, and there are legal requirements around how sofas are made. We are not saying “wool means you can ignore the rules”. You absolutely cannot.
But we are saying that wool is a naturally intelligent material. It starts from a much better place than many of the synthetic alternatives. It has properties built into the fibre itself, rather than added afterwards by spraying on a chemical solution and hoping for the best.
At Schplendid, we don’t want to drench our outer fabrics in strange stain-resistant or fire-retardant treatments. So we use a proper internal barrier layer where needed, while keeping the fabrics you actually sit on as natural as possible.
Wool is biodegradable
This is the bit the modern sofa industry does not much like to talk about.
Most sofas do not last forever. In fact, many are not really expected to. They are made quickly, sold from a swanky showroom, sat on for a few years, then eventually dragged to the tip, where their petrochemical foams and synthetic fibres become the planet’s problem.
Wool, by contrast, is a natural, biodegradable fibre. Given the right conditions, it breaks down and returns nutrients to the soil. It is part of a natural cycle of sheep growing fleece, being shorn and growing more fleece.
The Young Shepherd by Edward Arthur Walton (1860–1922). Image credit: Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums (public domain)
Wool, sheep and the British countryside
Wool is more than a material – it is connected to a landscape and a way of life that we think should be valued and supported.
In Britain, sheep are an essential part of the scenery: hillsides, dry stone walls, lambs in spring, wool caught on hedges, sheepdogs streaking across a field… images that are all deep in the national psyche.
But behind that picture is a hard-working farming industry. Sheep have to be cared for with hard labour. Shearing is essential for animal welfare, since most modern sheep need to be shorn regularly to stay healthy and comfortable.
The odd thing is that the wool itself, once so valuable, is now often treated as a low-value by-product. That seems not just economically sad, but culturally absurd. Here is a renewable, useful, breathable, flame-resistant, biodegradable natural fibre growing on animals in British fields – and at the same time we are stuffing homes with synthetic plastic padding.
We think wool deserves better – and deserves to be a key ingredient in the nation’s sofas.
Why doesn’t everyone use wool in sofas?
The short answer is: cost and convenience. Synthetic materials are cheap, uniform and easy to use. You can buy vast rolls of dacron, wrap it around foam, staple it into place, and move on. It is fast, predictable and profitable.
Wool needs to be handled properly and belongs to a slower, more thoughtful way of making furniture.
This is a recurring theme in the sofa industry. The best way is often not the quickest way. Eight-way hand-tied springs and solid beech hardwood framesare not the quickest way, but they are, in our view, the right way.
Wool at Schplendid
Inside a Schplendid sofa, wool forms part of the upholstery build-up over the springs and coconut husk.
The coconut husk provides structure, support and breathability, while the wool and cotton layer adds softness and comfort. Together, they help create a sofa that feels supportive, yielding and natural.
Quite simply, we use wool because it performs beautifully and is part of a better way of making sofas. And also because, frankly, if nature has spent several million years developing a breathable, resilient, renewable, flame-resistant fibre, it seems rather rude to ignore it and use plastic instead.
At Schplendid, we believe that wool is exactly the sort of material we should be returning to: renewable, useful, durable, repairable, biodegradable and connected to real farming, real craft and real landscapes.
How do we stop filling sofas with quite so much plastic? Well, wool is a very good place to start.
Painting top: Sheep, Hen and Chicks in a Landscape by Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven (1798–1881). Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums. Public domain Sheep by Sam Carter on Unsplash Wool fleeces by Photo by Roman Hnydin on Unsplash
A Schplendid Guide to the Wonders of Wool
Wool is breathable, resilient, renewable, naturally flame-resistant and cleverer than most synthetic sofa stuffings by some distance. Here’s why this ancient natural fibre belongs inside a real sofa…
Imagine you were asked to invent a miracle material for the future….
It would need to breathe, but also insulate. It would need to absorb moisture without feeling wet. It would have to be soft, springy, renewable, biodegradable and naturally resistant to flame. Ideally, it would regulate temperature, resist odours, last for years, and grow back after you’d harvested it.
A team of material scientists might spend decades and several billion pounds trying to create such a thing. But guess what… Sheep got there first!
Wool is one of the great natural materials, and considerably more sophisticated than the synthetic stuff that has replaced it in so much modern furniture making.
And yet, somehow, this extraordinary fibre – breathable, resilient, renewable, naturally flame-resistant and beautifully suited to upholstery – has largely been pushed aside by the modern sofa industry in favour of synthetic foams, polyester fibres and dacron. Or in other words, plastic.
At Schplendid, we think this is completely mad.
So we use wool inside our sofas, layered with coconut husk and cotton over our traditional springs. True, it is more expensive, more fiddly and less convenient than rolling out a sheet of synthetic fibre. But it is also a much better material.
This is our guide to wool: where it comes from, why it works, and why we think it belongs inside a real sofa.
A short history of wool
Wool has been with us for a very long time. Humans began domesticating sheep thousands of years ago, originally for meat and milk, and then increasingly for fleece. Once we had worked out that sheep could provide a renewable supply of warm, useful fibre without being killed, wool became one of the great materials of civilisation.
It clothed shepherds, soldiers, monks, kings, sailors, and schoolchildren. It made blankets, cloaks, sails, rugs, mattresses and upholstery. It helped build fortunes and towns. In medieval England, wool was a major national industry. If you visit old churches near our workshop in the Cotswolds (or in East Anglia or parts of Yorkshire), you will still find the evidence: grand “wool churches” built on the wealth of the fleece trade.
Today, the picture is rather different. British wool is often undervalued. In some cases, the price a farmer receives for fleece barely covers the cost of shearing. Which is a strange state of affairs, given that wool remains one of the most useful natural materials on earth.
But that, in a way, is the modern problem. We have become very good at making cheap synthetic substitutes for things that nature has already solved beautifully.
What is wool, anyway?
Wool is the natural fleece grown by sheep. At a microscopic level, it is a protein fibre, mainly made of keratin – the same family of tough natural proteins found in hair, feathers, claws and nails.
But unlike straight hair, wool fibres have a distinctive and very useful structure. A wool fibre has tiny overlapping scales on the outside, a complex internal structure, and a natural waviness known as crimp. That crimp helps wool hold air, which is why it insulates so well. It also gives wool its natural bounce and resilience.
Wool fibres can trap air as well as absorb and release moisture. They interlock, resist creasing and can be spun, felted or woven.
The point being, wool is not simply “soft stuff”: it is a tiny, highly engineered natural spring. No petrochemical plant required!
Lanolin: the sheep’s own protective polish
Fresh sheep’s wool contains lanolin, a natural waxy substance produced by the sheep’s skin.
Lanolin helps protect the fleece and the animal beneath it. It makes raw wool water-resistant, helps repel dirt, and gives newly shorn fleece that distinctive sheepy richness.
It is also the reason wool has long been associated with skincare, balms and ointments. If you have ever used a traditional hand cream for cracked skin, there is a fair chance lanolin has been involved somewhere.
Much of the lanolin is removed when wool is washed and processed. This is a good thing if you are planning to put the wool inside a sofa rather than live in a barn. But the presence of lanolin in raw fleece is part of wool’s wider story: this is a fibre designed by nature to protect, regulate and endure.
Wool breathes and regulates temperature
One of wool’s great talents is breathability.
Synthetic foams and fibres can feel hot, clammy or dead because they do not handle moisture and air in the same way. Wool, by contrast, can absorb moisture vapour and release it again. It helps create a more comfortable little microclimate around the body.
It’s a great feature for bedding and clothes: wool blankets can feel warm without being sweaty and woolly jumpers can insulate in the cold, but still feel breathable.
And it’s splendid for sofas too: a sofa made with natural, breathable layers really does feel different from one built around a sealed block of foam and plastic fibre. It feels somehow more ‘alive’ and certainly much more temperate than one of those padded plastic sandwiches.
Wool’s breathability is closely connected to its ability to regulate temperature. Because wool fibres are crimped, they trap air, which is a brilliant insulator.
The clever thing is that wool can help keep you warm when it is cold and more comfortable when it is warm. It is not magic, although it occasionally behaves like it. It’s physics, and it comes from a few thousand years of sheep standing around on windy hillsides.
For upholstery, this makes wool a particularly appealing layer. It adds softness and comfort without creating the dead, sweaty feel you can get from synthetic padding.
Wool is naturally resilient
A sofa takes a lot of punishment, what with all that sitting, sprawling, bouncing and so on. The materials inside a sofa need to be able to recover.
Wool is naturally resilient because of the crimp in its fibres. When compressed, those fibres have an ability to spring back. That does not mean wool is indestructible, or that it behaves like steel, or that it will never flatten. But compared with many synthetic fibres used in modern upholstery, wool has a beautiful natural liveliness.
This is one reason we like it as a top upholstery layer. Coconut husk gives structure, support and breathability,, while wool and cotton add a softer, more yielding finish over the top.
Wool and fire
Wool is also naturally flame-resistant – one of its most remarkable properties. Wool does not melt like many synthetic fibres. It is harder to ignite than cotton or polyester, and when exposed to flame it tends to char rather than drip or melt.
Now, it is important to be clear. Modern British upholstery still has to meet fire regulations, and there are legal requirements around how sofas are made. We are not saying “wool means you can ignore the rules”. You absolutely cannot.
But we are saying that wool is a naturally intelligent material. It starts from a much better place than many of the synthetic alternatives. It has properties built into the fibre itself, rather than added afterwards by spraying on a chemical solution and hoping for the best.
At Schplendid, we don’t want to drench our outer fabrics in strange stain-resistant or fire-retardant treatments. So we use a proper internal barrier layer where needed, while keeping the fabrics you actually sit on as natural as possible.
Wool is biodegradable
This is the bit the modern sofa industry does not much like to talk about.
Most sofas do not last forever. In fact, many are not really expected to. They are made quickly, sold from a swanky showroom, sat on for a few years, then eventually dragged to the tip, where their petrochemical foams and synthetic fibres become the planet’s problem.
Wool, by contrast, is a natural, biodegradable fibre. Given the right conditions, it breaks down and returns nutrients to the soil. It is part of a natural cycle of sheep growing fleece, being shorn and growing more fleece.
Wool, sheep and the British countryside
Wool is more than a material – it is connected to a landscape and a way of life that we think should be valued and supported.
In Britain, sheep are an essential part of the scenery: hillsides, dry stone walls, lambs in spring, wool caught on hedges, sheepdogs streaking across a field… images that are all deep in the national psyche.
But behind that picture is a hard-working farming industry. Sheep have to be cared for with hard labour. Shearing is essential for animal welfare, since most modern sheep need to be shorn regularly to stay healthy and comfortable.
The odd thing is that the wool itself, once so valuable, is now often treated as a low-value by-product. That seems not just economically sad, but culturally absurd. Here is a renewable, useful, breathable, flame-resistant, biodegradable natural fibre growing on animals in British fields – and at the same time we are stuffing homes with synthetic plastic padding.
We think wool deserves better – and deserves to be a key ingredient in the nation’s sofas.
Why doesn’t everyone use wool in sofas?
The short answer is: cost and convenience. Synthetic materials are cheap, uniform and easy to use. You can buy vast rolls of dacron, wrap it around foam, staple it into place, and move on. It is fast, predictable and profitable.
Wool needs to be handled properly and belongs to a slower, more thoughtful way of making furniture.
This is a recurring theme in the sofa industry. The best way is often not the quickest way. Eight-way hand-tied springs and solid beech hardwood frames are not the quickest way, but they are, in our view, the right way.
Wool at Schplendid
Inside a Schplendid sofa, wool forms part of the upholstery build-up over the springs and coconut husk.
The coconut husk provides structure, support and breathability, while the wool and cotton layer adds softness and comfort. Together, they help create a sofa that feels supportive, yielding and natural.
Quite simply, we use wool because it performs beautifully and is part of a better way of making sofas. And also because, frankly, if nature has spent several million years developing a breathable, resilient, renewable, flame-resistant fibre, it seems rather rude to ignore it and use plastic instead.
At Schplendid, we believe that wool is exactly the sort of material we should be returning to: renewable, useful, durable, repairable, biodegradable and connected to real farming, real craft and real landscapes.
How do we stop filling sofas with quite so much plastic? Well, wool is a very good place to start.
See also:
Naturally luxurious: Why we upholster our sofas with coconut and wool instead of foam
10 Ways We’re (Nicely) Shaking Up the Sofa Industry
Images:
Painting top: Sheep, Hen and Chicks in a Landscape by Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven (1798–1881). Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums. Public domain
Sheep by Sam Carter on Unsplash
Wool fleeces by Photo by Roman Hnydin on Unsplash