Blue Beauty

Settee Makeover:

This settee is an inherited vintage piece that just did not fit the owner's vision or modern decor. They wanted to keep the settee for sentimental reasons, but it was tired and oh, so dated!

For the main portion of the settee, the owner chose a dark blue performance velvet fabric called "Eclipse" from Greenhouse Fabrics, and artistic blue and green batik inserts made of cotton canvas to give this traditional settee a little modern funk. The owner refinished the wood frame changing it from a blonde stain to a dark walnut stain.

This settee had been re-upholstered at least once before, but that was m-a-n-y years ago. How do we know? Older upholstery techniques: horsehair stuffing, lots of hand sewing, and the fabric was attached to the frame with hundreds and hundreds of tacks. As you can imagine, tacks leave significant holes in the furniture frame, and it appears this piece had been upholstered more than once as the frame was riddled with tack holes. The first job was to fill those holes and repair the frame. I use staples to attach fabric to a frame as they are strong but leave minimal damage.

The settee cushion had an innerspring unit called a "marshall unit" similar to what you might find in a mattress on a much smaller scale. Each spring has it's own pocket. If you look at the before photo you can see the cushion seems comparatively thin. Over time the padding had compacted to the point that the size of the cushion was dictated solely by the size of the inner springs. This left a very uncomfortable seat. You can see the *after* cushion is significantly larger. The cushion thickness on the *after* photo was determined by measuring the current gold cushion cover seam to seam, and taking into consideration the amount of padding needed to adequately cushion the spring unit. Initially that gold cushion cover was 5" thick! This is how much the cushion materials compact and deteriorate over time, making for a very uncomfortable seat!

This blue beauty is happily in its new home.

** Note: I never post photos of pieces until the owner has them back in their possession. I feel strongly that the owner gets to see the pieces before the rest of the world.

My current project is a club chair that shall be revealed in due course!