The Wing-Back That Wasn't a Howard

In the autumn of 2024 a retired teacher from Mytholmroyd rang the workshop about a wing-back armchair she had inherited from her uncle.

He had died the previous year at the age of ninety-four. The chair had been his favourite for forty years — he had read every evening sitting in it from the time he retired in 1985 to the week before his death — and she wanted it restored as a remembrance, to be given pride of place in her own front room. She had been told by a London dealer, by phone, that her uncle's chair was “almost certainly a Howard” and that she should expect the restoration to cost in the region of four thousand pounds.

I told her gently on the phone that I'd want to see the chair before quoting, and especially before agreeing with any attribution. Genuine Howard wing-backs from the Berners Street workshop carry a brass tag on the underside — the firm's stamp — and have specific structural fingerprints I would recognise once I'd opened up the bottoming cloth. I didn't want to talk her into spending four thousand pounds on a chair that turned out to be something simpler. She drove it over the following Tuesday, with her son helping carry.

It was a handsome chair. Vertical wings, sprung back, deep seat with a feather-and-down cushion, brass castors at the front. The cover was a dark-green hide, scuffed but original. Underneath the bottoming cloth, however, the story was different from the one the London dealer had told her. There was no brass Howard tag. The webbing was machine-stamped jute of a kind that didn't appear in the trade until the late 1930s. The springs were lashed in a perfectly competent 8-knot pattern, but the spring tops were welded rather than tied with twine — which Howard's workshop never did. The frame timber was beech rather than birch.

What she had was a 1940s wing-back made by a good provincial workshop in the Howard style — a very common piece of furniture for the period — rather than a Howard original. I told her the news as carefully as I could: the chair was not what she'd been told it was, the dealer had been wrong (or being optimistic), and the four-thousand-pound figure was right for a Howard but not for what she actually had. The chair was, I said, absolutely worth restoring — it had been built well and had eighty more years in it — but at the right price, somewhere between £1,200 and £1,800 depending on fabric.

She was quiet for a long moment. I expected her to be disappointed; instead, when she spoke, she was relieved. She had not really wanted to spend four thousand pounds. She had been preparing herself to do it, on the basis that her uncle deserved nothing less than a Howard restoration — but the news that this had not been a Howard freed her from the obligation. She would much rather spend £1,500 and put the saving towards her grandson's wedding the following spring. We agreed there and then. Pat ordered two hides of green leather (her uncle's preference), and I started work the following week.

The job took six weeks of evening work. Strip, frame inspection (sound), webbing replaced (the originals were tired), springs kept and re-lashed in the proper hand-tied 8-knot pattern this time, scrim, blind stitches, top stitches, second stuffing in fresh horsehair, calico, wadding, leather. The leather was the slow part: two hides at £420 each, cut into eleven panels with the scarring placed where the buttoning would hide it. I welted every visible seam. I'd not done a leather wing-back since opening the new workshop, and the muscle memory took a few hours to come back.

She collected the chair in November. Her son drove. They carried it together into her front room and positioned it by the window, where the afternoon light from the garden would catch the leather. She sat in it for perhaps five minutes without saying anything. Then she stood up and asked me how I had managed to make a 1940s chair feel like the one her uncle had read in for forty years.

I told her that was the chair her uncle had read in for forty years — same frame, same springs, same horsehair geometry — and that the cover was the only part that had needed replacing. The thing that carries the memory of a sitter's habits is the springs and the first stuffing, not the cover. The new leather felt right because everything underneath it was right.

She paid the bill that afternoon and sent a Christmas card three weeks later, thanking me for being honest with her about the chair's provenance.

Honest pricing wins more long-term work than ambitious pricing.

The London dealer would have made one big sale and never seen her again. We did one fair-priced job and got a Christmas card — and a recommendation to her son-in-law, who brought us his own restoration the following March.