The modular couch

[Kragen Sitaker]

(Haven't fact-checked this or searched for existing versions.)

I was at a friend's house and saw his modular couch.  It consists of
cubes of dense polyurethane foam --- about 15 inches on a side, and
there are somewhere around 40-70 of them.  They're just sitting there
in a pile, and they make a pretty comfortable couch; most of them are
stacked so that most of their faces are either perpendicular or
parallel to the floor.  You can rearrange the couch to serve different
purposes pretty easily.

It occurred to me that you could build a Couch Construction Kit along
the lines of these cubes, but more versatile.  

First, cover each cube with a fuzzy soft cover in which the fuzz
consists of loops of fiber.  It needs to be comfortable to rest your
skin against, not coarse like the "loop" part of most hook-and-loop
"velcro" fasteners, but it needs to have loops that can hold velcro
hooks.

Now, take a bunch of velcro hook strips --- the things you would sew
on clothing or glue to the wall or whatever.  If you have two cubes
sitting next to each other, touching on one face, you can connect them
more permanently by putting velcro strips across the crack, on two
opposite sides, like the bottom and the top.  

Now, to make the velcro strips comfortable to sit on, cover their
backs with some more of the same soft fuzzy stuff, extending a bit
past their sides so it covers them well.

Now you can assemble these cubes into a wide variety of furniture:
mattress, soft table, chairs, bench, couch, pillows.  And it's much
easier to move to a new apartment than a traditional sofabed, as well
as being more comfortable to sleep on.

I fear this may be unreasonably expensive, though, because I've heard
that dense, clean polyurethane foam suitable for furniture costs quite
a bit.

I'm writing this on an Amtrak train where the furniture is very far
from modular.  I'd like to sleep, but I'm sprawled across two seats
with an armrest kind of poking into my back.