My wife and I ordered a new leather sofa from the Brighton store of Furniture Village. It arrived on 9/2/23 and we unwrapped it and put it in the lounge. At the time we had our grand-daughter staying with us so we didn't really use the lounge. On the 10/2/23 we were awakened from our sleep coughing, the fumes from the sofa were affecting our breathing. On the 11/2/23 we went back to the store and told the branch manager that we wished to bring the sofa back because it was giving off toxic fumes and making us ill. The sofa is on finance and the manager said that it was our property now and there was nothing he could do. As the discussions unfolded and I still needed a way of getting the sofa out of my house, he said that if I brought the sofa back he would treat it as being fly tipped and have it disposed of. The store manager advised us to put the sofa in the yellow box storage unit and that the cost would only be about £20. As our priority was to get the sofa out of the house we borrowed a van and took the sofa to yellow box storage. With the insurance and storage cost I think it was just over £100. Whilst we waited for the so called independent technician to check the sofa the costs were mounting. When the technician did come he said that he wasn’t insured to remove the sofa from the storage unit, so he lifted some of the packaging, took some photos, sniffed it and said it was fine. With the storage costs rising to over £500 we decided to put the sofa in an unused garage at my son’s house. When moving the sofa where my skin came into contact with the sofa it came up in blisters and this was now about 3 months after it was delivered. We decided to take legal action to get our money back. Whilst purchasing the sofa we were led to believe it was made in Italy and it now turns out it was made in China. At the present time we have five leather sofas, two leather chairs and a leather footstool till this day we have not experienced any problems from all of this Italian furniture. The citizens advice/ trading standards asked me to ask which company was protecting our customer rights. The finance company said that both companies were. They also said that they could not answer some of our questions because they were not there at point of sale. To this end we decided to take legal action against Furniture Village. The court date for the hearing was April 2024. The Brighton manager appeared, with my wife and I. Furniture Village didn’t even bother submitting a defence to the court which was obviously picked up by the district judge. They obviously knew that it would be dismissed, because the finance company should have been the defendants. Yesterday we wrote to the finance company to ask how they wish to proceed. I will post again when we hear from them. The reason for doing this review is that you should be able to expect a company with over 50 stores in the UK to sort out such basic problems. The finance company is called Novuna which is a trading name for Mitsubishi H C Capital UK plc. The complaints about Furniture Village are so extreme they have their own web site and even a facebook page. We wish we had read them before trusting Furniture Village. We would urge all prospective customers to check the reviews before using Furniture Village apart from the stress it is also costing us a considerable amount of money to pursue this, out of principal I want Furniture Village to properly test the fumes given off by the next leather sofa that comes from China, it is not possible for any normal customer to have this work done. I spent hours on the internet contacting the labs UKAS recommended but no-one was able or willing to do the work. Total costs so far:- Sofa £1974. Storage costs £518. Legal costs so far £461. Total £2953.00