Upholstery in
Kew

Kew sends us more antique furniture than almost anywhere else we work. The suburb has held onto its grand old homes for a long time, and the furniture inside them has usually been held onto just as long: a wing chair bought before the war, a set of dining chairs that came down through a family, a chaise that has sat in the same bay window for decades. These are pieces built from good hardwood in the first place, which is exactly why they are still worth doing properly rather than replacing.

A lot of what comes to us from Kew has never been reupholstered before, or was last touched up so long ago that the stuffing inside has gone hard and the springs have dropped. That is not a sign the piece is finished. It is a sign it is due, and due is a very different thing from beyond saving.

Because the furniture is old, the approach has to be old as well. We work with horsehair, hessian and webbing the way the piece was originally built, not with shortcuts that would look fine for a year and then fail. Timber gets the same respect: if an arm or a leg has lost its polish, it goes to the French polishing bench rather than being covered up.

The pattern from Kew is consistent enough that we can often guess where a piece is from before the address is mentioned. It is an armchair or a wing chair with a hardwood frame that has never let the owner down, upholstered in a fabric that has finally worn through after years of use, or a dining suite where one or two chairs have started to wobble while the rest hold firm. The frame is rarely the problem. What has failed is the material inside it: springs that have lost their tension, webbing that has stretched, stuffing that has flattened.

Because so much of this work is genuinely old, we treat the upholstery and the timber as one job rather than two. A chair that needs new webbing might also need its show wood re-polished where handling has worn the finish thin, and doing both while the piece is on the bench means it goes home finished rather than half done.

Where the original stuffing is horsehair and it has simply gone hard with age rather than rotted, we card it out, clean it and put it back rather than starting again with something new. It keeps the piece behaving the way it always has under a hand, which matters more on an antique than it does on a modern lounge.

The most common fault in an antique chair or sofa from Kew is not the timber, it is what sits between the timber and the cover. Springs that were hand tied decades ago work loose over time, webbing perishes even when nothing looks obviously wrong from the outside, and stuffing settles and thins in exactly the spots a person sits. None of that shows up in a photo until the cover is stretched thin enough to reveal it.

We strip a piece back to its frame to see what is actually there before we quote it properly. Where nine-way hand tied springs suit the piece, we tie them again by hand rather than swapping in something modern that changes how the chair feels. Where the frame itself has come loose at a joint, that gets re-glued and reinforced before anything else goes back on, because upholstery over a wobbly frame is a short lived repair.

Timber is treated the same way. A French polished finish that has dulled, scratched or lost its colour with age is brought back on the same bench the upholstery happens on, so a sideboard, a chair frame or a table edge comes back matching rather than needing a second trip somewhere else.

The team behind every Kew job is small and has been doing this a long time: a restorer and French polisher with fifty years in the craft, a machinist with thirty, and an upholsterer with twenty two, close to a hundred years between the three of us. Nothing about an old piece from Kew tends to surprise this team.

Where a piece calls for foam we use Dunlop HR35, 200 density for a firmer seat and 165 for something softer, backed by Dunlop's own ten year warranty. Any hardwood frame we build carries a thirty year guarantee on the frame itself, and we are fully insured for work on furniture of real value. You are welcome to visit the Eltham North workshop and look at fabric in person, it is a residential address so a call first is appreciated.

A proper quote for a Kew antique accounts for what is actually inside the piece: the condition of the frame, whether the springs need retying or replacing, whether the horsehair can be saved or needs to be rebuilt, and what the timber needs once it is bare. We price that work with quality materials and aim for a high-end finish at a mid-tier price, which means we are sometimes the cheaper quote and sometimes not. A quote that comes in well under what proper materials and hand tied springs cost at wholesale has almost certainly left something out, and on an antique that something matters.