Upholstery in
Deepdene

Deepdene is one of the smaller suburbs in Melbourne's inner east, carved out of Balwyn as a suburb in its own right: a handful of quiet streets of Edwardian and interwar houses with Kew to the west, Balwyn to the north and east, Canterbury to the south, and Camberwell a little further south. Houses here tend to be kept rather than knocked down, and the furniture follows suit: a dining set kept for a generation, armchairs sat in daily, a lounge comfortable but showing its age.

We are in Eltham North, about twenty-five minutes' drive to the north-east. That is close enough for pickup and delivery to be easy to arrange, and a single chair or a set of drop-in seats is small enough to bring to us yourself. Either way it starts with a photo, and we tell you plainly whether the piece is worth recovering, repairing, or leaving alone.

What Deepdene furniture tends to need is not dramatic: a set of dining chairs with seats gone flat and fabric faded by the sun, or an armchair with a good hardwood frame and a cover worn shiny on the arms. Either way the result is furniture more solidly built than most sold new.

Drop-in seats are the simplest: the board lifts out, we strip the old cover, fit Dunlop high-resilience foam at a firm 200 density and new fabric with clean corners, and screw it back in. Armchairs are more involved. We check every joint and re-glue anything that moves, replace perished webbing, re-tie springs where the chair was built with them, rebuild the padding and cut a new cover to that chair.

The first question with any older Deepdene piece is whether it is worth doing at all. It depends on the frame. Hardwood with dowelled or mortised joints will outlast several covers and is worth the work. A stapled softwood or chipboard frame from a mass-produced lounge often is not, and we will say so from the photo before any money changes hands.

Once the frame passes, the rest is straightforward: new foam at the right density, 200 for a dining chair, 165 where you want to sink in a little, with Dunlop's ten-year warranty; webbing replaced, never patched; springs re-tied nine-way by hand where the chair calls for it; and for daily use, a fabric rated at 25,000 rubs or more. Our guide on whether reupholstery is worth it goes through the sums.

There are three of us at the workshop: a restorer and French polisher of fifty years, a machinist of thirty and an upholsterer of twenty-two. Everything is done here in Eltham North and nothing is sent out, so a Deepdene armchair that needs a leg polished as well as a new seat goes home finished in one trip.

Hardwood frames we build carry a thirty-year frame guarantee, and the workshop is fully insured. It is a home address rather than a showroom, so ring first if you want to come and handle fabric samples.

When we quote a Deepdene chair we are pricing the actual work: stripping, frame repair if needed, new webbing and springs where they have gone, new foam, and a cover cut for that chair in quality Australian and imported fabrics. Because we price the job in front of us, our figure is sometimes the lowest quote and sometimes not. A quote well under what good materials cost at wholesale has skipped something, and you find out in a year or two.