Upholstery & reupholstery
in Montmorency

Montmorency is a steady suburb for us, and the work has a clear shape: a lot of repairs, and a lot of recoveries. Frames that have loosened, springs that need attention, cushions that have gone flat, alongside sofas and armchairs whose covers are worn out but whose bones are still good. It is practical, everyday work rather than one-off showpieces, and it suits the kind of quiet, established streets Montmorency has.

Being just along the road from our Eltham North workshop makes that kind of steady, ongoing work easy to manage. A piece can be collected, worked on and brought home without a long detour, which matters when a repair is small but the piece is needed back quickly.

We are also seeing more of a particular problem from Montmorency lately: newer furniture, not old furniture, needing attention. New leather recliners that have started to crack or wear at the arms well before the rest of the chair has earned it. That is where the next section comes in.

A Montmorency customer came to us with a set of new recliner chairs whose leather on the arms was already wearing through, cracking and losing its finish well before the chairs themselves were old. It is a problem we see more often than people expect: the arms of a recliner take constant contact, hands, elbows, sometimes drinks resting on them, and if the leather on that particular chair was thinner or lower grade than it should have been, it shows there first.

Replacing the arms in matching leather was not the practical answer. Leather is sold by the whole hide, so a small repair like a pair of arm caps can mean buying an entire hide for a few square inches of material, which rarely makes sense on cost or on waste. Instead we are making custom vinyl arm caps in a matching colour, fitted to the existing arms so the repair blends in rather than standing out.

It is a good example of matching the fix to the actual problem rather than to habit. The rest of the chair, the frame, the mechanism, the cushions, is fine. Only the high-wear leather needed addressing, so that is all we are replacing.

The arm cap job is really a leather-versus-vinyl story, and it comes up more than people realise. Genuine leather is a natural material and a good one, but it is sold by the hide, which makes small or partial repairs expensive and wasteful. A quality commercial-grade vinyl, by contrast, is sold by the metre, wipeable and hard-wearing, and it can often be colour-matched closely enough that a repair on an arm or a wear point is barely noticeable. It also costs about the same per metre as entry-level leather, so the choice is rarely about saving money, it is about doing a small repair sensibly.

There is also a separate problem worth knowing about: lounges that peel or flake are usually bonded or PU leather rather than genuine leather, and no amount of conditioning fixes that once it starts. The good news is the frame underneath is nearly always fine, so a peeling bonded-leather lounge is often a straightforward recover rather than a write-off.

Beyond leather and vinyl work, the general pattern from Montmorency holds: frames that need re-gluing, springs and webbing that need renewing, and foam rebuilt in Dunlop HR35, 200 density for firm or 165 for soft, backed by Dunlop's ten-year warranty.

Upholstery, machining and French polishing all happen under one roof in Eltham North, which is what let us turn the recliner arm caps around as a genuinely custom job rather than a generic patch. Between the three of us there is around a hundred years of trade experience: a restorer and French polisher with fifty years, a machinist with thirty and an upholsterer with twenty-two.

Hardwood frames we build carry a thirty-year guarantee and we are fully insured. Montmorency customers are welcome to bring a chair in or arrange pickup, and to see fabric or vinyl samples in person at the workshop, a short drive away. Call ahead first, it is a residential address.

A proper quote explains not just what a repair costs but what material makes sense for it, leather, vinyl or fabric, and why. On a full recover that means stripping to the frame, repairing joints, new webbing and springs where needed, Dunlop foam and a cover cut and sewn to the piece. We price the actual work, so sometimes we come in under another quote and sometimes over it. A quote well under the wholesale cost of proper materials has usually left something out.