You buy a couch for your living room. It looks good, feels comfortable, and fits your budget. Months later, a dropped cigarette or a space heater placed too close sets the cushion on fire. Within minutes, your home is filled with toxic smoke, and the flames spread faster than you ever imagined. If you or a family member are injured, or if your home is destroyed, you may have a product liability case against the furniture manufacturer. The legal question is simple: was the couch unreasonably dangerous when it left the factory?

Product liability law holds manufacturers, distributors, and retailers responsible for putting dangerous products into the hands of consumers. For upholstered furniture, the danger often comes from the foam padding inside the cushions. For decades, manufacturers used polyurethane foam because it is cheap and comfortable. That foam is also highly flammable. When it catches fire, it burns fast and releases thick black smoke filled with toxic gases like hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. More people die from smoke inhalation than from burns in furniture fires. The real killer is the foam, not the fabric cover.

There are three main ways a manufacturer can be held liable for a dangerous household product like a flammable couch. The first is a design defect. This means the way the product was designed made it inherently unsafe. If a manufacturer chooses to use a highly flammable foam without any fire-resistant barrier or chemical treatment that meets reasonable safety standards, the design itself is the problem. The second is a manufacturing defect. This happens when the couch that injured you left the assembly line different from the others. For example, the factory skipped a flame-retardant spray on your particular batch of cushions. The third is a failure to warn. If the manufacturer knows the foam is flammable but does not put a clear warning label on the couch telling you to keep it away from open flames, they may be liable for the injuries that result.

Courts do not require you to prove that the manufacturer was careless. In product liability cases, the law often applies strict liability. That means the manufacturer is responsible for the harm caused by a defective product regardless of whether they did anything wrong. The idea behind strict liability is that companies should pay for injuries caused by their products because they are in the best position to prevent those injuries. They can test materials, engineer safer designs, and make sure every couch that leaves their facility meets safety standards. You, the consumer, have no way to inspect the chemical composition of the foam or to test how fast it burns. You rely on the manufacturer to sell you a product that will not kill you in an ordinary household fire.

A real-world example makes this concrete. In the late 1970s and 1980s, thousands of people died in furniture fires. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission eventually pushed for a mandatory flammability standard for upholstered furniture. That standard, known as 16 CFR Part 1634, requires that furniture resist ignition from a smoldering cigarette and from a small open flame. However, the standard is not perfect. Some manufacturers still use foams that meet the bare minimum but are far from safe. In many cases, the furniture sold before the standard was enforced or the furniture imported from countries with looser regulations remains a hazard on the market.

If you are injured by a burning couch, the first thing to do is preserve the evidence. Do not throw the remains away. Photograph the damage, keep the fire department report, and save any receipts or product labels. Then contact a lawyer who handles product liability cases. The lawyer will need to prove that the couch was defective and that the defect caused your injuries. That usually involves hiring experts to test samples of the foam and compare them to industry standards. It also involves looking at the manufacturer’s internal documents to see if they knew about the fire risk and did nothing.

Manufacturers will often argue that you misused the product or that the fire started from an outside source. But the law says a product must be safe for its intended use and for reasonably foreseeable misuses. Dropping a lit cigarette on a couch is a foreseeable misuse. Placing a space heater near a couch is also foreseeable. If the couch bursts into flames from a small ignition source that a safer design could have resisted, the manufacturer is still on the hook.

The bottom line is that a couch should not turn your living room into a death trap. When it does, product liability law gives you a way to recover your medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and property damage. And it sends a message to manufacturers that unsafe design choices have consequences. If you own upholstered furniture, check the tags for flammability information and consider replacing old couches made before modern safety standards. Your life could depend on it.