Upholstery & reupholstery
in Warrandyte

Dylan grew up in Warrandyte. Not nearby, not "we cover that area", but the first thirty years of his life spent in the town. That is a different thing to a business listing a suburb on a map, and it shows up in the practical detail: knowing which streets a truck will not fit down, which houses have the long walk from the road to the front door, and how far the bush blocks sit below the driveway.

It also means a lot of the work here has come the way work does in a small town, one job at a time and by word of mouth. We have recovered seating at one of the town's best known pubs and re-covered furniture in a good number of Warrandyte houses over the years.

Warrandyte has always been an artists' town, a bush suburb of mudbrick and timber along the Yarra where things get chosen for craft rather than fashion. The furniture reflects it. What comes to us from here tends to be one-off pieces, hand-made or hand-picked, and heirlooms the owners would far rather fix than throw out. That is exactly how we prefer to work.

Two things come up here more than anywhere else we work. The first is access. Warrandyte houses sit on steep blocks down long drives, often with a flight of timber steps between the road and the door. Getting a three-seater out without damaging it, or the house, is a job in itself. We plan for it rather than turning up and improvising.

The second is light and air. Bush-facing rooms with big windows are lovely to sit in and hard on fabric. Sun fade on the north side of a lounge, dry-rotted webbing, and foam that has gone brittle years before it should have are all normal here. When a piece is going back into a room like that we will say so at the quote and suggest a fabric that will hold its colour, rather than putting something delicate into a room that will destroy it.

On mudbrick and timber houses there is usually a third consideration, which is that nothing is a standard size. Window seats, built-in bench cushions and bed heads almost always have to be made to measure. We template on site and build to the actual opening, not to the nearest catalogue dimension.

On period and hand-made furniture we work the way the piece was originally built. Nine-way hand-tied springs where the frame calls for them, hessian and webbing replaced rather than patched, and horsehair kept and re-carded where the original stuffing is still sound. Where a modern fill simply does the job better we use Dunlop high-resilience foam, 200 density for a firm seat and 165 for something softer.

Upholstery, machining and French polishing all happen under our roof, so a chair needing new fabric, a re-glued frame and polished show-wood never leaves the building or waits on anyone else's schedule. Our hardwood frames carry a 30-year guarantee, we are fully insured, and there is around 100 years of trade between us.