Armchair Restoration

This project has been simmering away since May last year when I started a furniture restoration course with Johan Van Westen at In Studio.

Completed Restoration

The chair was bought for a good price by Shirley some years ago.  The original springs had lost their temper though and the supporting webbing had broken through.  All the joints were loose and there were several cracks in the frame including a major one through a rear leg.

Upholstery removed, showing original horse hair and straw filling.

Johan took me through the process of breaking down the chair and splicing in new pieces of wood.

New mahogany spliced into back leg to reinforce a cracked mortice joint.

New mahogany in foot to reinforce a crack in the bottom of front leg

It was an excellent, hands-on course and I immediately enrolled in the next one to learn about reassembling the frame and applying French polish.  The frame was re-glued using traditional hot hide glue and then re-polished with shellac.

The cleaned frame prior to French polishing

I then passed the frame on to upholsterer James Backhouse (JBU Limited) who has done a lovely job with the upholstery.  New webbing and steel springs were fixed in place.  He used traditional coir (coconut fibre) filling to supplement the original straw and horsehair (horsehair being very difficult to obtain).  A calico liner was fixed in place before the upholstery fabric was secured.  Shirley had already obtained the fabric and James matched it with a gimp scroll around the edges.

Gimp edging to fabric.  Note the veneer repair to a rail (The rails are beech with a mahogany veneer).

The chair had lost its castors some time in the past.  They would have originally been either brass or ceramic.  I sourced new brass castors from Heico in the UK.  There were no New Zealand made castors in the right size (round ones for the front legs and square ones for the back legs).  The NZ ones that were available were about triple the price anyway so it paid to shop around.

Brass castor.

I briefly considered ageing the castors with ammonia fumes but it sounded like quite a toxic process, so nature will have to take its course.

Repair to back leg

The sign of a good furniture restorer is that he or she has not advertised their work so to speak.  There are a few things that my eye falls on.  The splice on the main leg is still visible, even after fitting and staining it under Johan's instruction, but overall I am reasonably happy with the finished project.  On to the next one!