filter data with php or sql?

I'm not sure if this is an anti-pattern or not, but it feels a bit convoluted, so I'd like to get your opinion on how these cases should be handled:

Let's say we have this data:

$sofas[0]['color'] = 'green';
$sofas[0]['pillows'] = 8;
$sofas[0]['pattern'] = 'moons';

$sofas[1]['color'] = 'green';
$sofas[1]['pillows'] = 8;
$sofas[1]['pattern'] = 'ducks';
$sofas[1]['footrest'] = 'small';

$sofas[2]['color'] = 'green';
$sofas[2]['pillows'] = 8;
$sofas[2]['pattern'] = 'stripes';
$sofas[2]['speakers'] = 'badass';

color, pillows and pattern comes from the database, whilst "footrest" and "speakers" have been added on by an api.

We can say for the sake of argument that there are 1250 different attributes that can be added by the api like "footrest" and "speakers".

we now want to load an some data from the database based on these attributes, like an image for example.

so we have a table that looks like this:

ID, attribute_value, image
1, 'color_green' 'img0023',
2, 'pillows_8' 'img003',
3, 'pattern_moons' 'img002',
6, 'pattern_ducks' 'img0083',
7, 'footrest_small' 'img0058',
10, 'pattern_stripes' 'img0073',
11, 'speakers_badass' 'img00pluto'
etc, etc, etc;

So, the way I figure I can approach this two ways:

$sofaSQL="'color_green',
'pillows_8',
'pattern_moons',
'pattern_ducks',
'footrest_small',
'pattern_stripes',
'speakers_badass'";

$sql = "SELECT ID, attribute_value, image FROM `example` WHERE attribute_value IN ($sofaSQL)"

and then loop through the array and check if the key + '_' + value matches the rows in the recordset to see what images should be used for sofas[0], sofas[1] and sofas[2].

The other option I see would be to prep each sofa with a different sql statement, ie:

$sofaSQL="'color_green',
'pillows_8',
'pattern_moons';

-add images-

$sofaSQL="'color_green',
'pillows_8',
'pattern_ducks',
'footrest_small';

-add images-

$sofaSQL="'color_green',
'pillows_8',
'pattern_stripes',
'speakers_badass'";

-add images-

That seems simpler, but it doesn't feel right to hammer the database with a seperate request for each item in the array.

So, what would you recommend in this case? IS there a better way of dealing with attributes that are selected randomly/from an api?