Upholstery in
Surrey Hills

Surrey Hills is a genuinely leafy pocket of the inner east, its Edwardian and Federation homes set along quiet, established streets that change hands less often than the newer suburbs further out. Furniture bought for a house like that was generally chosen to last, and when it finally needs attention the owner tends to want it kept rather than swapped out.

Seen from the workshop, Surrey Hills lies to the south, across the Yarra and the Eastern Freeway, with Canterbury on one side, Box Hill on the other, and Camberwell and Mont Albert close by. Distance is not the obstacle it might seem: we collect and return furniture by arrangement, so the piece comes to us and goes home again without you needing to move it.

Housing of that age shapes the furniture inside it. Rooms are proportioned differently from a new build, fireplaces and bay windows take up wall space, and the pieces bought to suit them were often solidly made in the first place. That is why restoration with traditional materials, rather than a quick recover, tends to be the right call for furniture of this age, and why made-to-measure pieces such as window seats and bench cushions earn their place in an older home.

Think of the furniture a Surrey Hills house of this age tends to hold: a settee that matches the era of the house, dining chairs handed down through the family, an armchair recovered once decades ago and due again. For pieces like these the question is seldom whether they are worth keeping. It is how far back to take them and what to keep of the original.

Where the frame is sound, our preference on genuinely old furniture is restoration, not a straight recover. Horsehair that is still in good order stays and is re-carded rather than thrown out for foam. Hessian and webbing that have perished are replaced across the whole seat, never patched in sections. Slower, yes, but it is the difference between a restored period piece and an old shape with modern insides.

Later furniture from the same houses takes a plainer path. New foam, a fresh cover, a recliner mechanism put right, a frame re-glued: practical repairs that keep a good sofa or chair in service for another long stretch instead of being replaced.

By the time a piece from a Surrey Hills home reaches us, the frame, the hardest part to get wrong, has generally proven itself over decades. The wear lives in everything attached to it. Springs drop, webbing lets go, foam either sets hard or crumbles, and the cover wears thin at the front edge of the seat and along the arms where hands rest.

The rebuild starts from that frame. Seats get Dunlop HR35 high-resilience foam, 200 density where a firm seat is wanted, as on a dining chair, and 165 where a lounge should give a little, with Dunlop's ten-year warranty behind it. If the piece was built on springs, they are hand-tied nine ways, so the seat moves as its maker intended rather than sitting like a new block dropped into an old shell.

Cover choice matters as much as the rebuild. For a sofa the family actually uses, a fabric rated at 25,000 Martindale rubs or better is the sensible floor, and with a large dog in the house 30,000 or more. Quality Australian and imported fabrics are in the range to look through, or bring your own. Our antique restoration guide walks through the full process.

Three trades share one roof at Eltham North: upholstery, machining and French polishing. A period chair that needs its joints re-glued, new springs, fresh padding, a made-up cover and its legs repolished never leaves the building or waits on another tradesperson. Add it up and the three of us carry around a hundred years of trade: fifty years for the restorer and French polisher, thirty for the machinist, twenty-two for the upholsterer.

Any hardwood frame we build is guaranteed for thirty years, frame only, and the business is fully insured. If you would rather see the workshop and handle the fabrics before deciding, you are welcome to come out from Surrey Hills. We work from a residential address, so ring first and we will make sure someone is on hand.

A Dylberry quote sets out every stage: the piece stripped so the frame can be checked and any loose joint repaired, webbing and springs renewed, foam at the density the seat needs, and a cover cut and sewn for that piece alone. Because the price follows the actual work rather than a set rate, we are sometimes the most competitive quote a Surrey Hills household receives and sometimes we are not. When a figure lands well below what quality materials cost at wholesale, something has been left out of the job.