How Zoe Latta, Ella Emhoff, and I All Found the Same Deeply Discounted Hay Sofa
It’s a comfy couch with a confounding backstory.
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The first time I saw this two-tone Hay Magscouchwas when my colleague Erin Schwartz shared a link to aZeeland, Michigan-based furniture outlet, back in 2022. It sold deeply discounted Herman Miller and other brands you’d find at Design Within Reach, including a three-seat teal and pale green wool version of the famous blobby modular sectional for around $1700.
I’d wanted the couch for years; this size starts at about $4,900 new. I mapped the four-hour drive to Michigan and seriously considered it but decided to reverse-image search the couch and see what else came up. HD Buttercup, a suburban-presenting furniture warehouse based in L.A., had pages and pages of the Hay couch in every configuration and in five different colorways — goldenrod/orange microsuede and wool versions in that teal/pale green, charcoal/gray, khaki/navy, and dark green/blue — all for much cheaper. I chose the last color and bought two three-seat couches and a corner insert for less than a new three-seater; I planned to make a superlong L-shape and a love seat. I prayed I hadn’t bought a fake. Seven boxes showed up on a semi two weeks later, with free shipping.
The couch, which was listed as being made with Kvadrat fabric, felt like the real thing with its mix of foam and goose-down fill and signature zigzag stitching, but I still couldn’t figure out why the price was so cheap. I emailed Hay but never heard back, and I couldn’t find any evidence that the company had ever sold these colors. Then I started to see the couch in those unusual colorways. A Facebook Marketplace supplier in midtown had a whole warehouse of them. It popped up on eBay and ultimately in the background of people’s spaces.Ellen Van Dusen, who had the same color as me, kept one in her studio in Brooklyn. Next I saw it inElla Emhoff’s apartment in New York, followed byZoe Latta’s home in Los Angeles andKatie Crutchfield’s house in Kansas City. Those three have the orange.
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Emhoff, who got hers about four years ago, says that she also bought it from HD Buttercup “on like, 60 percent discount (plus free shipping from L.A.). It lived in my apartment for the most part until my dog got it a bit too grimy and it was demoted to my studio. I think it works much better here.”
“We bought the couch shortly after we bought our house in Kansas City in 2022,” Crutchfield told me. “It’s a mid-century modern, atomic ranch-style house built by this guy Don Drummond in the ’50s (a real Kansas City IYKYK-type situation). When I was trying to furnish it, I did a lot of research, because it felt like the house wanted color and personality. I saw a picture of my friend Ellen Van Dusen’s living room — she’s the queen of color and personality — and she had the Hay Mags couch in a different but equally fun colorway. I did some searching and found ours, deeply discounted, for sale at HD Buttercup, which may in fact be closed now.”
Latta also found hers at HD Buttercup during the pandemic.“I do cover it with blankets, not to preserve it but because I find the suede finish to be unapologetically absorbent of my standard poodle, two sons, and muddy husband,” she says. Also I bought the kidsNuggetto match, which felt like an extension of the sectional. I think the marigold is now out of stock, though. My friends have the green one.”
The couch is the kind of thing friends and family tend to buy once they see it. My mom bought one. Van Dusen’s friendTasha Goldthwaitalso bought one after seeing hers.
But last week, when I texted Van Dusen, who bought hers off Craigslist in 2021, she provided a missing puzzle piece and the most confounding origin story imaginable: “Someone from Hay told me that they made these for WeWork, just before they went bankrupt. So they had all this stock that then WeWork wouldn’t take, and they didn’t want to include them in their regular catalogue. So they off-loaded them really cheap to resellers.”
While some of the couches did appear to make it to WeWork, fromVarick Streetin New York to thePalo Altolocation, this does explain, among other things, the co-working-space-style colorways, which are mildly head-scratching but at the same time mostly appealing.
“This couch was definitely something I had to build around as far as how I conceptualized the rest of the room,” says Crutchfield. “I tried to visualize it like a Matisse painting or something, colors that are bright and interesting and not the obvious choice.”
You can still find the WeWork couch here and there, oneBay,1stDibs, and a site calledHerbert, the online reincarnation of HD Buttercup. It has even made its way toWayfair. Now some four to five years later, we’re still really happy with our Hay sofas. Van Dusen speaks for most of us when she says, “I love that it’s chunky, two-tone, comfy, huge — and was extremely cheap.”
Other Non-Two-Tone Couches We Like:
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