Upholstery & reupholstery
in Bulleen

Bulleen sends us more work than most suburbs on our books. Some weeks we are out there more than once collecting a job, whether that is a lounge suite, a set of dining chairs or a recliner that has stopped reclining properly. It is close enough to our Eltham North workshop that a Bulleen pickup rarely needs a special trip of its own.

The best known piece of work to come out of Bulleen is the seating at the Veneto Club, which we rebuilt and recovered. It is the one job we will actually name, because the club is happy for people to know, and because it shows the commercial side of what we do alongside the household side.

Between the two, Bulleen keeps a steady mix moving through the workshop: family lounges on one bench, club banquettes on another, both getting the same frame-first approach before a cover ever goes near them.

Most Bulleen jobs start the same way any household job does: a photo of a lounge or a stack of dining chairs, a look at the frame underneath, and a decision about whether it is worth doing, which it almost always is if the timber is sound.

The Veneto Club job was a different scale but the same process stretched wider. The seating was stripped back, frames checked and repaired where needed, and rebuilt with fire-rated foam, which is standard for commercial and venue seating. It was covered in a commercial-grade vinyl chosen to stand up to a room that gets used hard, night after night, and the work was done after hours so the club did not lose trading time.

Not every job out of Bulleen is that size, but it is the kind of project our workshop is set up for: enough hands and enough bench space to take on a whole room of seating at once.

In a family home, the usual culprit is foam that has lost its height and springs that have gone slack, which makes a once-firm lounge feel like it is swallowing whoever sits in it. We rebuild the seat with Dunlop HR35 foam, firm at 200 density or softer at 165, with the usual ten-year Dunlop warranty, plus nine-way hand-tied springs or fresh webbing depending on what the frame calls for.

In a venue like a club or function room, the brief is different. Seating has to survive constant use, so fire-rated foam is standard and the cover is almost always a commercial-grade vinyl rather than fabric. Vinyl is wipeable and hard-wearing, and because it is sold by the metre rather than the hide, a run of banquette seating or a single damaged section is straightforward to match without buying more than you need.

Families with pets or young kids sit somewhere in between. For a fabric lounge that is going to take that kind of wear, we recommend at least 25,000 Martindale rubs, more like 30,000 or higher if there is a big dog in the house. There is more detail in our guide to pet-friendly and kid-proof fabric.

Upholstery, machining and French polishing all happen under the one roof in Eltham North, so a Bulleen job that needs a repaired frame, new springs and a re-polished timber edge does not have to travel between three different workshops. Between the three of us there is around a hundred years of trade: a restorer and French polisher with fifty years behind him, a machinist with thirty, and an upholsterer with twenty-two.

Hardwood frames we build carry a thirty-year guarantee, and we are fully insured for the commercial work as well as the household jobs. Bulleen customers are welcome to come and see the workshop and look through fabric in person, it is a residential address so a quick call first helps us have the right samples out.

Our price covers stripping the piece to its frame, repairing any joints, replacing webbing and springs where they need it, new Dunlop foam, and a cover cut and sewn to fit rather than pulled over what was already there. We price the job in front of us using quality materials rather than racing to the lowest number, which is how a high-end finish ends up costing a mid-tier price. When another quote sits well below what good materials cost at wholesale, expect something has been left off the job.