A 1930s club chair is a good first upholstery project, which is not the same as an easy one. The frames are generally sound, the shapes are forgiving, and there is enough of them about that a mistake is not a disaster.
What follows is the shape of the job rather than a step by step. The detail varies with every chair, and the useful thing to know in advance is where the work actually is.
Strip it slowly and photograph everything
The old covering is the pattern for the new one. Take it off in one piece wherever possible, labelling each panel and photographing every corner and fold before it comes away.
Most people rush this and spend the rest of the project guessing. The stripping is the survey.
Judge the frame before you commit
With the covering off, the decision point arrives. Check every joint by hand. Loose joints must be knocked apart, cleaned of old glue and reassembled, and this has to happen before anything is put back on.
Look for old woodworm flight holes and press firmly around them. Sound timber with historic holes is usually fine. Timber that crumbles is not, and a crumbling rail is the point at which many chairs stop being worth the materials.
Webbing is the whole chair
The seat is held up by jute webbing strained across the frame and interwoven. Everything above it, springs, hessian, stuffing and top cover, depends on that grid being tight.
It has to be stretched hard with a proper strainer, far tighter than seems reasonable. A seat that sags after a year almost always sagged because the webbing was put on by hand.
Keep the horsehair
If the chair still has its original horsehair stuffing, wash it, tease it out and use it again. It outlasts foam by generations, it breathes, and it can be added to.
Replacing it with foam is quicker and quieter, and it converts a chair that could have lasted another eighty years into one that will need doing again in fifteen.
What to expect
Allow considerably more time than the guides suggest, and buy roughly ten per cent more fabric than the calculation says, because the first attempt at the inside back will probably be wrong.
The part that surprises most people is how much of the job is preparation. By the time the top cover goes on, the chair is already finished. That last stage is just the part that shows.
Part of the Complete Guide Buying Vintage Furniture: A Complete Guide Read the full guide →
