Upholstery · Mont Albert
Mont Albert's Federation and interwar homes tend to keep good furniture rather than replace it, and our Eltham North workshop recovers, repairs and restores what comes out of them.
Send a photo for a quote Call 0425 832 619What we do
For a Mont Albert home the list runs from recovering a settee or a set of dining chairs, through proper restoration of Federation and interwar pieces, frame, spring and foam repairs and French polishing, to bed heads, ottomans and window seats made to measure.
Local
Mont Albert is a small suburb with a large share of heritage housing: Federation villas, Edwardian weatherboards and interwar bungalows on established blocks. When a house has been kept to its period, the furniture inside it generally has been too, and when something wears out the brief is to bring it back in keeping, not modernise it away.
It sits to the south of our Eltham North workshop, a compact pocket with Surrey Hills to its west and south, Box Hill to the east and Balwyn and Mont Albert North to the north, with its own small village of shops and the railway line through the middle. The drive is no reason to hold off: pickup and delivery for Mont Albert is by arrangement, so nothing has to fit in your car or be carried down a hallway by you.
A house that old tends to hold furniture that is genuinely old rather than merely worn, a settee or a set of chairs that has sat in the same front room for the better part of a century, with padding, webbing and springs that were never expected to last this long. That is restoration territory, not a straightforward recover.
From the bench
Furniture from a house of this age can predate its current owner by a generation or two: the settee bought with the house, the dining chairs handed down with the silverware, the armchair that has simply always been in that corner. The question is never whether to keep it, only how to bring it back without losing what makes it the piece it is.
On a genuine period piece the approach is restoration first, replacement only where the frame gives us no choice. Sound horsehair stays and gets re-carded. Perished hessian and tired webbing come out and are replaced in full, not patched. Slower than stripping everything out for foam, and the only way the chair comes back as the same chair. Our antique restoration guide explains how we approach frame and padding on a period piece.
The same households own newer furniture too, and that gets the direct treatment: fresh foam, a new cover, a recliner mechanism stripped and serviced. Practical repairs like these are what save a decent lounge from hard rubbish.
Period homes
Decades in a Federation or interwar home are a fair test of a frame, and most pass it, which matters because a frame is the costly part to replace. The layers on top of it are a different matter. Springs sag, webbing gives out, foam sets like a brick or turns to crumbs, and the cover goes through wherever it is rubbed most, the arms and the leading edge of the seat.
The seat goes back in on Dunlop HR35 foam with a ten-year Dunlop warranty on it: 200 density for a dining chair that needs to hold you upright, 165 for an armchair that ought to yield. Where the original build was sprung, the springs are re-tied nine-way by hand rather than replaced with a flat unit, so a period chair still sits like one.
The cover deserves as much thought as the frame. For the sofa everyone piles onto each evening, look for a wear rating of 25,000 Martindale rubs or better, and push that to 30,000 or more if there are large dogs in the house. Our guide to hard-wearing upholstery fabric walks through the numbers.
How we work
Nothing leaves the building between stages. The frame is re-glued, the springs re-tied, the padding rebuilt, the cover cut and sewn and the show timber repolished by the three of us in Eltham North, so a period chair is never shuttled between three separate trades. Our restorer and French polisher has been at it for fifty years, our machinist for thirty and our upholsterer for twenty two, which comes to roughly a century of trade all told.
Hardwood frames that we build ourselves are guaranteed for thirty years on the frame, and we are fully insured. Visitors from Mont Albert are welcome to look through the fabric books and watch the work in progress; the workshop is at our home in Eltham North, so phone 0425 832 619 beforehand and you will not find the gate shut.
Worth knowing
Two quotes for the same settee can be a long way apart, and the gap is nearly always in what each one includes.
When we quote, the number includes taking the piece back to the frame, re-gluing any joints that have loosened, new webbing and springs where the old ones have gone, foam at the right density for the seat, and a new cover patterned and machined to that one piece. Every job is priced on what it needs, not off a rate card, which is why a Mont Albert household will sometimes find ours the lowest quote on the table and sometimes not. If a quote comes in well under what good materials cost at wholesale, something was skipped.
Our guide to choosing a Melbourne upholsterer is worth ten minutes before you book anyone in.
Good to know
We do. Mont Albert has plenty of homes from the Federation and interwar decades, and furniture of that vintage is exactly what our restorer has spent fifty years on: traditional methods and materials, so the piece ends up sound and comfortable without looking modernised.
By arrangement, yes. Tell us when suits, we collect the piece, do the work at Eltham North and drop it back to you finished.
Yes. Both share a boundary with Mont Albert, as does Balwyn, and Canterbury sits only a few minutes further on past Surrey Hills. Pickup and delivery to any of them is arranged the same way.
Look at the frame before anything else. Furniture of this period was generally built on a hardwood frame that outlasts everything on top of it, and where that frame is sound, restoring is nearly always the better call. Two photos by text will get you a straight answer. Our guide on whether reupholstering is worth it goes through the signs.
Take a couple of photos of the piece and text them to 0425 832 619, or upload them with the form here. Inside 24 hours you will have a free quote, and it becomes a firm price as soon as your fabric is chosen.
Because they are not always quoting the same job. The higher figure may include the invisible work, webbing, springs and foam renewed under the cover, while the lower one may be fabric stretched over whatever was there. Ask for each quote broken into its parts, and treat a figure well below the wholesale cost of decent materials as a warning that something has been skipped.
Nearly always, yes. The usual complaints are a cover gone baggy, a seat that went flat within a year, or webbing and springs never replaced under the new cover. A photo tells us what it would take, and our guide to what goes wrong in a bad reupholstery job covers the common faults.
Kept, wherever it is still springy and clean. Old hair is opened up, re-carded and put back over fresh hessian, which is why a restored Edwardian chair sits the way it always did. Only hair that has powdered or matted beyond saving goes.
We do, in the same building and by the same team, not sent out. Arms, legs and any exposed rail are repolished while the upholstery is off and the timber is easy to get at.
Both work. What tips it is how each is sold: leather by the whole hide, vinyl off the roll by the metre. Redoing one or two damaged seats in leather can mean buying a hide you will barely touch, so a matching commercial vinyl is often the practical answer, and it gives up little: wipeable, hard-wearing, priced per metre in the same territory as entry-level leather. The leather versus vinyl guide on this site lays out the trade-offs.
Drop-in dining seats, with notice, the same day or the next. Give a sofa around a fortnight after the fabric lands, the fabric lead time being the one thing outside our hands. A full period restoration gets no rule of thumb, because the time depends on what turns up once the old cover and padding are off, and that is talked through at the quote.
Almost certainly, and it was probably never leather. Peeling and flaking is the signature of bonded or PU leather, a coated fabric that breaks down with wear. The frame underneath is often fine, so we strip the old skin off and recover in real leather or a commercial-grade vinyl, whichever suits the piece.
Nearby
Work in Mont Albert is run out of the same Eltham North workshop as the rest of our furniture reupholstery work across Melbourne. For the full range of what we take on, start at the Dylberry Design upholstery workshop.
Local to Mont Albert, send a photo of your sofa, chairs or piece and we'll come back with a rough price. Pickup & delivery by arrangement.
Send a photo of your piece and we'll come back with a rough price, no obligation, no pressure.
Send a photo for a quote Call 0425 832 619