The Pair of Nursing Chairs

In the spring of 2024 a woman in her sixties walked into the new workshop at Topland Business Park carrying nothing more than her phone.

She wanted, she said, to find out whether a pair of chairs that had been in her family for as long as she could remember were worth restoring. She showed me the photos: two matching late-Victorian nursing chairs, low-seated, with stuffed seats and shaped show-wood backs, the original cover faded almost to a uniform sand colour and the horsehair just visible at the front rail of one of them.

She had inherited them from her grandmother's house in Heptonstall when the house was sold in 2003. They had lived in her own loft ever since — she had never had room for them, but couldn't quite bring herself to throw them out. Her granddaughter was about to move into her first flat in Leeds and had asked, half jokingly, whether she could have something old of her great-great-grandmother's. The chairs came down out of the loft for the first time in twenty-one years. They were dustier than they had any right to be and the cover was past saving, but the chairs themselves looked, to her eye, essentially intact.

She brought them in the following week. We tipped them up on the bench together — she wanted to see what was underneath as much as I did — and pulled the bottoming cloth on the first one. The webbing was 1890s jute, faded but still under tension. The springs were the originals, eight of them, lashed in a perfect 8-knot pattern. The horsehair stuffing was, when I dug a finger in to test, dry and resilient and almost certainly the original. The frame had two minor loose joints and nothing else wrong with it.

I told her honestly that this was as good a pair of chairs as I'd seen all year. The dust on the surface was the easy part — underneath it was 130 years of perfectly executed traditional upholstery, all of which I could keep and re-use. The cover and the calico were past saving; everything below them could stay. I quoted £850 per chair, plus fabric, with the second chair done as a near-duplicate of the first. She agreed on the spot and went to find Pat in the office to look through fabric books.

Pat sat with her for the best part of an hour. The customer wanted something that would honour the chairs' Victorian provenance without being slavishly period; her granddaughter, after all, was the eventual recipient. They settled on a deep-navy wool damask from a small mill in West Yorkshire, with a small repeat that worked at the scale of a nursing chair. Three metres total, around £110 a metre. Pat ordered it that afternoon.

I worked on the first chair for the better part of a fortnight. Strip, frame inspection, two loose joints re-glued with hide glue, webbing tested (kept), springs tested (kept), original horsehair lifted out and re-carded, scrim back on, blind stitches, top stitches, second stuffing, calico, wadding, top cover. Total twenty-four hours of bench time. The new cover went on cleanly and the rebuilt chair sat exactly the way the old one had — the original maker's measurements preserved by the original first stuffing — just with a hundred and thirty years of dust gone.

The second chair followed a week later. The customer came back to collect them on a Saturday afternoon in late May. She had her granddaughter with her — a woman of about twenty-five, freshly graduated, slightly overwhelmed at the prospect of being given two chairs she had never seen before. The granddaughter sat in the first chair, then the second, then ran her hand across the new cover. She asked her grandmother whether the chairs felt the same as they had when she was a child in her great-grandmother's house in Heptonstall.

“Exactly the same,” her grandmother said. “Identical. It's like sitting in 1985 again.”

That, in the end, is what good traditional restoration produces. Not a chair that looks new but a chair that feels, to the people who knew it, indistinguishable from the chair they remember. The fabric changes. The horsehair, the springs, the frame, and the geometry — the things you actually feel when you sit in the chair — do not. The chairs went home to Leeds in the granddaughter's car.