The Baker sofa

Of course, there were differences. The Baker sofa comes in more than 1,000 fabric options and can be made in custom sizes, while the West Elm model is covered in something called “performance velvet” and comes in two colors (dove gray and mocha), though several other colors and fabrics can be special ordered. The frame of the Baker sofasvintage is made of solid maple and has eight-way hand-tied springs, inserted after the coil springs are installed, to ensure stability, while the frame of the West Elm model is plywood.

The Baker sofa is more customizable and better constructed, and likely to be more comfortable as well, yet the West Elm version is very similar in design at a fraction of the cost. Do I mind sacrificing quality and the ability to customize for a significant savings? Would it be wise to invest in the Baker?

Or better yet, could I find a couch that offered a satisfying mix of the two? At Room & Board I found an 89-inch sofa called the Wells for about $2,400, while Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams offered a similar midcentury-inspired couch I liked, with a hardwood frame and eight-gauge steel serpentine springs that supposedly helped eliminate “squeakage,” for around $2,000, on sale. Both were nice. Both were big improvements on my current couch. But neither offered the Porsche-like sofa engineering that I’d been hearing about.

In our earlier conversation, Mr. Breitling had cited Poltrona Frau as a company that makes high-end sofas that last for decades, calling the leather “just incredible.” I paid a visit to the showroom in SoHo and caught sight of one with metal legs and an elegantly simple form, priced at $13,000.

“That’s the John-John,” the salesman told me, explaining that it was designed by Jean-Marie Massaud and named after John F. Kennedy Jr. I wasn’t crazy about the name, and the designer meant nothing to me, but my ears perked up when the salesman said that, like all Poltrona Frau sofas, it was “made by hand, by men working with simple tools.”

I wanted to learn more. I called Roberto Archetti, the company’s brand director in Italy, and asked skeptically what goes into a $13,000 sofa. Gold bricks?

Calmly, Mr. Archetti began to pummel me with the sofa’s luxury features: the seat is solid beechwood; the feathers in the cushions are applied by hand; the full-grain leather is the highest quality and dyed through, so a surface scratch won’t reveal the white lining. And to achieve “maximum comfort,” Mr. Archetti said, the John-John went through several prototypes.