A Brief, Opinionated History of Upholstery

I thought a long time about whether to begin this book with a history chapter. Most upholstery books either skip history altogether or give you four polite pages on the subject before getting on with the techniques. I've gone the other way: a long, opinionated history at the front, because I genuinely believe you cannot understand why the layers go in the order they go in until you understand the order in which they were invented. Every layer in a traditional sprung seat is the answer to a problem someone solved hundreds of years ago.

Webbing solves the problem of how to suspend something across a hole. Hessian solves the problem of how to keep horsehair from falling through the webbing. Stitched edges solve the problem of how to give a chair a sharp shape with a bag of hair. Springs solve the problem of how to be soft on top and not collapse. Foam solves the problem of speed and price. Each new layer is built on the memory of the previous one's failures.

It also gives you the right answer to a question every customer asks: why does a properly-built traditional chair last a hundred years and a flat-pack one last ten? It is because the traditional chair has the experience of nine centuries of iteration baked into its construction, and the flat-pack one does not.

The thousand-year sequence, in eight events:

Upholders Restoration Chippendale Pratt patents Sewing PU foam Staple Eco craft Company boom at work coil spring machine arrives gun revival chartered

Before there was upholstery For most of human history, people sat on hard things.

Logs, stones, the floor, low benches, the rim of a fireplace, the lid of a chest. Chairs themselves were rare until the late Middle Ages and were a status object first and a comfort object a long way second — the

‘chair’ in mediaeval Europe was a throne for the lord of the hall, while everyone else made do with stools. The Latin word for chair, cathedra, gives us

‘cathedral’: a building defined by the bishop's seat in it. Comfort, when it came, came as cushions. Loose pads of fabric stuffed with straw, wool, feather or flock, tied to the seat of a wooden chair with cord or laid loose on top of a hard bench. There is a long history of cushion-makers separate from chair-makers. The earliest formal upholstery trade, when it emerged, emerged out of cushion-making, mattress-making and wall-hanging-making — not out of joinery. By the late thirteenth century, in the wealthier houses of northern Europe, you would find loose cushions on benches and settles, simple stuffed pads tied to the seats of dining chairs, and elaborate textile-covered beds with hangings. The bed, rather than the chair, was the central piece of upholstered furniture, and remained so for the next four hundred years. A ‘state bed’ in Tudor England was the most expensive piece of household furniture by an order of magnitude, and the fabric on it cost vastly more than the timber underneath.

Tudor and Stuart England Royal upholstery in Tudor and early Stuart England ran through an institution called the Great Wardrobe, a department of the royal household originally formed to safeguard the monarch's clothing and bed-furniture, but which by Henry VIII's time had become the procurement office for everything textile in the king's palaces. The Great Wardrobe placed contracts with individual upholders, mercers and embroiderers; it kept obsessively detailed inventories; and it is largely because of those inventories that we know what we know about how Tudor and Stuart upholstery was made. The picture they paint is one of staggering material expense and modest construction beneath. A Tudor royal bed might cost several hundred pounds — an enormous sum — for the silk velvet, gold lace, embroidered curtains and feather mattress that went into it, while the timber bedstead beneath was comparatively cheap and often re-covered repeatedly through its life. The fabric carried the prestige; the wood was a frame for the fabric. This is a useful corrective to the modern eye. We are used to thinking of antique furniture as ‘the wood’, with the upholstery as a slightly disposable cover. The contemporary view was the opposite: the fabric was the piece, and the frame merely held it up.

By the early seventeenth century the basic vocabulary of upholstered furniture as we still recognise it — the armchair, the wing-back, the low stool, the side chair with a stuffed seat — was in place. Construction was simple: a wooden frame, jute or hemp webbing tacked across the seat rails, a single layer of horsehair, coir or wool stuffing, and a top fabric tacked over. No springs. No stitched edges yet. Comfort was modest by modern standards. A four-poster state bed: the Yet the trade was organised. By 1650 there were apex of seventeenth-century upholsterers' shops in Westminster and the City upholstery. catering to the gentry, tax-paying members of the Company, and a recognisable apprenticeship system — seven years, beginning at fourteen — that produced trained craftsmen for the next wave.

The Restoration boom (1660 onwards) When Charles II returned to England in 1660, he came back to a set of palaces that had been thoroughly looted. The Commonwealth had sold off the bulk of the royal furnishings — Cromwell's regime did not believe in gilt — and what remained had been moved, stripped or burned. Charles needed to refit Whitehall, Hampton Court, St James's and Windsor essentially from scratch.

“The frame of Her Majesty's gilded throne, twenty pounds. The blue and gold brocade and gold lace of the cushion and covering thereof, seventy-two pounds, eight shillings.” — Royal Wardrobe inventory for Queen Anne, 1707

That ratio — the upholstery costing more than three times the carved and gilded frame beneath — was standard. It is the clearest demonstration of where the value of an upholstered piece sat in the period: in the fabric, the trim, the labour of the upholsterer, not in the timber.

FROM THE WORKSHOP · WHAT I TELL SCEPTICAL CUSTOMERS When someone walks into the workshop sceptical that a re-cover could possibly cost more than the chair did new, I point at the Queen Anne ratio. The fabric on a fine piece, properly fitted, has always been the expensive bit. That isn't a modern racket; it's how the trade has worked for three hundred years. What was modern and unusual was the brief twentieth-century period when furniture was so cheaply made that the cover seemed expensive by comparison. We're returning to the historical norm. It is a useful conversation. People relax when they understand they are not being overcharged; they are participating in something very old.

The eighteenth-century masters By 1740 London had an upholstery trade that had matured into named workshops with national reputations. The big firms of the mid-century — Chippendale, Mayhew & Ince, the Linnells, Vile and

Cobb, Seddons — were not really ‘cabinet-makers’ in the sense we now use the term. They were what their own letterheads called cabinet-makers and upholsterers: they produced complete furnished interiors, frame and cover and curtains and carpet, often directly to the design of an architect such as

Robert Adam.

Thomas Chippendale's workshop at 60 St Martin's Lane is remembered today as a cabinet-maker's because of the Director, his published pattern book of designs for carved chair-frames. But the surviving accounts from his country-house commissions show that his upholstery work was fully half his business by value. Apprentices in his shop learned upholstery first and cabinet-making second, on the very sensible grounds that you cannot upholster what you cannot first build. The construction of an eighteenth-century stuffed seat is the one a modern restorer is most likely to encounter, and the one that defines what we now call ‘traditional’ upholstery. Webbing across the bottom of the rails. A single layer of horsehair built up high and stitched into a rectangular pad through a covering of scrim. A second, softer stuffing of loose horsehair on top. A layer of cotton felt to smooth the surface. A calico under-cover to refine the shape. The show fabric over the top, hand-stitched at the closures. No springs — springs were still a century away — but with deeply built first and second stuffings the chair was remarkably comfortable, and remains so where the original work survives.

The evolution of the seat in five steps:

Medieval Restoration Georgian Victorian Modern

Cross-section through a seat, drawn at five points in its history. Each new layer answers a problem the previous construction couldn't.

Pratt's seat: a layer of jute webbing across the rails, hand-tied coil springs sitting on top, lashed across at the heads to share the load.

The other innovations of the nineteenth century followed almost immediately. Isaac Singer's lockstitch sewing machine reached British workshops by the early 1850s and revolutionised the making of cushion covers and skirts. Mass production took over the lower end of the trade by the 1860s, with factory-made armchairs becoming affordable for the middle classes for the first time. The Victorian taste for buttoning, deep stuffing, fringes, tassels and visible decorative nailing — the look that gave the period its reputation for excess — was made commercially possible by these manufacturing changes. Style cycled through revivals at unprecedented speed. The 1820s and 1830s saw an Egyptian craze, set off by Napoleon's campaigns and continued by the early reports of British archaeologists; chairs sprouted lotus capitals and sphinx armrests. The 1840s and 1850s ushered in Gothic, with carved trefoil backs and ecclesiastical-looking cresting. The 1860s and 1870s brought a Louis Quatorze revival of seventeenth-century French ornament. The Aesthetic Movement of the 1880s rejected all of these and started yet another style. Most Victorian chairs you find today are revivals of revivals.

The twentieth-century revolution The twentieth century broke upholstery in two. Until roughly 1950, even mass-produced furniture used a recognisable version of the traditional construction Pratt and his successors had developed: webbing, springs, hessian, stuffing of some kind, fabric on top.

The work was faster and the materials cheaper, but the principle was the same. Three inventions, arriving more or less together in the 1950s, changed everything. Polyurethane foam, first synthesised in 1937 but not available cheaply until after the Second World War, replaced horsehair, coir, palm fibre and cotton felt at a single stroke. Zigzag (sinuous) springs, simpler and much cheaper to install than coil springs, replaced traditional spring-up in mass production. And the pneumatic staple gun, brought into the trade in the late 1950s, replaced the upholstery tack, allowing fabric to be fixed to a frame five times faster. Together, these three changes made it possible to build a whole sofa in a day. Traditional construction took a skilled upholsterer roughly a working week per chair. Modern foam-and-staple construction takes a few hours, and the resulting piece is comfortable when new but lasts a tenth as long. The market for hand-made traditional furniture collapsed, and by the 1970s training in traditional methods had become a specialist preservation skill rather than the standard apprenticeship route.

Where we are now We are in a craft revival. It has been quietly building since the 1990s and gathered real momentum in the last decade. The drivers are partly aesthetic — people are noticing that their flat-pack sofas don't last and don't age well — and partly environmental, since a properly built piece of furniture is one of the most carbon-efficient objects you can own. A sofa that lasts thirty years carries a tenth the embodied carbon of three sofas that last ten years each, even before you account for the timber and steel that go to landfill. More small workshops have opened in Britain in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty. Beginner upholstery courses are routinely oversubscribed. Trade-association membership is rising. A generation of new upholsterers is being trained — fifty-something career-changers, mostly — in workshops much like ours, on chairs much like the ones in this book. It is a good time to be in this trade. It is also, more importantly, a good time to be a customer of it. The combination of historical depth and modern environmental necessity puts hand-made upholstery on a footing it hasn't had since the eighteenth century. I don't think this is a passing fashion. I think traditional skills are coming back to stay.

The chair you're about to upholster sits at the end of this thousand-year line. Every layer you fit is a small republication of a choice someone made long before you. Take it seriously. Be glad you get to do it.