The Last Chair

I have been doing this work for thirty years.

I trained at Vale Upholstery in the modern method — with the traditional underneath it — under Colin Brown and Bryan Mitchell, who have shaped how I think about every chair I've worked on since. After Vale I did vehicle interiors at Mellor Coachcraft. From 2010 to 2024 I worked self-employed across various firms, traditional and modern. In 2024 my wife Pat and I started Greenwood Upholstery at Topland Business Park — the old Thornber Chicks site — which is where this book is being written.

Most upholsterers don't retire in any clean way. The work tapers. You take fewer commissions. The big restorations go to younger workshops. The bench gets used a few days a month for repeat customers and small jobs. At some point you do your last full restoration without realising it's your last. Greenwood Upholstery is only a year or two old as I write this, so the far end of that arc is a long way off — but it's worth thinking about now, because the choices we make at the start determine whether the tapering, when it eventually comes, is a graceful one.

What I think about, in this final chapter of a book that's already gone on too long, is what stays. The chairs I've worked on go on without me. A chair I restored last year for a customer in Calderdale will see her granddaughter through to old age, and will probably need another restoration around 2055 by an upholsterer who isn't yet born. The chair will outlast both me and that future upholsterer. Maybe a third upholsterer in 2125 will lift the bottoming cloth and read my signature — blocky capitals, dated — and wonder who I was.

I sign and date every job for that future upholsterer. It's the small kindness across time that the trade does for itself: every restorer leaves a note for the next one, hidden underneath the chair where the customer never looks. The notes accumulate over centuries. Some of the wing-back chairs I've stripped have signatures from three or four different workshops, dated decades apart — several generations of the same trade serving the same chair.

I've written this book partly to leave something more than the signatures. The signatures are private — they live inside the chairs and only other upholsterers see them. The book is public; anyone who wants to learn can read it. I've tried to put on these pages the things I wish someone had told me at the start: the techniques, yes, but also the judgement calls, the customer conversations, the pricing principles, the moments when the right answer was “no”. None of this is secret; all of it took me decades to learn; I'm glad to pass it on. That's also why I run the courses: a book can do half the job, but the other half lives in your hands and only transfers across a bench.

The chair I'm working on this afternoon, while I draft this final chapter, is a 1920s Edwardian armchair belonging to a customer in Sowerby Bridge. The seat horsehair is being replaced; the springs are being re-lashed; the cover will be a dark-green velvet she chose carefully with Pat's help in the office last month. By the time you read this the chair will be back in her house, where she's lived since 1986. It will see her remaining years and pass to whoever in her family wants it. It will still be in working order in 2080 if it's looked after.

The work is small in any one moment. The chair on the bench, the cup of tea at eleven, the customer's weekly text-message update, the signature on the bottoming cloth. None of it is dramatic. But the chairs accumulate — mine run into the thousands now — and across thirty years they amount to something. I don't quite know what to call that something. Continuity, probably.

If you've read the book to the end, thank you. The trade has been good to me; I hope it'll be good to you too.

Sign your work. Quote your worst-case time. Tell your customers the truth. Match the technique to the chair, and the chair to the customer. Build something that will be in service after you're gone.

And remember to leave a note for whoever comes after you. They'll appreciate it. I always have.