If you’ve as much as flicked through a fashion feature this autumn, you’ll know that black leather is very much in – for the brave as a dress, for the more subtle as a pencil skirt.

And for the home? It seems that a black leather sofa is a perennial, the interiors equivalent of a not-so-special pair of jeans. Turn on your black-leather-sofa radar and you will find them everywhere: in the homes of Come Dine with Me contestants; in the slouchy bit of your local pub; in endless television adverts, which favour those with moving parts; even in novels. In Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd’s most recent work, a black leather sofa represents a life with little interior value, an object to be removed when a home is to be feminised. Sofa as literary device. They even appear in the waiting rooms of those Harley Street clinics where a single treatment costs more than the furniture.

What is behind this is not taste, but the fact that a certain type of black leather sofa (not least those with the moving parts) tends to be on the inexpensive side, but being both black and leather fools us into thinking it is smart and unobtrusive. You, of course, know better.

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers