High-quality furniture is usually constructed by hand, but the quality of the upholstery also depends on the processes and the materials used, in addition to the fact that they are done by hand. We’ll talk about things to look for while buying made-good furniture right here.
To start, let’s define upholstery so that everyone is on the same page. The term “upholder” is an old English term for someone who held up their wares for inspection. There are other theories as to how this was applied to chairs and sofas, but many people think it has to do with the way the fabric supports you on the seat!
Furniture upholstery, believe it or not, mostly refers to items intended for support, such as footstools and ottomans, as well as those intended for seating, such as chairs and couches. Four distinct components make up high-quality handcrafted furniture of this kind: the frame, the seating support, the comforting padding, and the cover.
The significance and purpose of each of these are described below, and they all play a significant role in the comfort and appearance of your chair or sofa:
Handmade Furniture: The Frame
Your skeleton, or frame, is what gives your body its shape and allows it to withstand the pressures and stresses it experiences when you work. Just as your tendons hold your muscles to your skeleton, your furniture likewise has a skeleton, which is known as the frame to which the entirety of your seating and back cushion is attached.
Handmade furniture that has been expertly built should have a sturdy skeleton. For strength so that the frame may provide a sturdy skeleton for the visible section of the furniture, our forebears created robust mortise and tenon, dovetail, and pinned joints. The entire frame of the furniture has upholstery attached to it, so it must be sturdy and able to support the weight for which it was designed—yours!
Furniture Upholstery: The Support
A seat must be able to withstand the initial shock of your weight as you flop into it and then rebound to support you. The back of your chair should provide support while also bending slightly under pressure as you recline. This is provided by springs in contemporary furniture upholstery that are made to follow the contours of your body.
Sinusoidal springs, which are made up of several connected wires squeezed into the shape of a wave, and individually coiled springs fastened to the frame are the two basic types of springs. Even the latter is capable of being prefabricated into a single-framed spring unit. The best furniture supports, however, are individually coiled springs joined to a compressible base.
In addition to the springs themselves compressing, the base to which they are linked also does so, providing the maximum amount of comfort. This base is created in handcrafted furniture by attaching (or nailing) narrow fabric webbing from front to back and then weaving it from side to side of the base frame of the seat. In order to tension the springs, the individually coiled steel springs are then secured to the webbing base with twine. The tips of each spring are then connected with lengths of twine that are stretched down and affixed to the frame.
The Comfort Layers
Because springs are uncomfortable to sit on, a canvas layer is stretched over the spring layer and nailed to the same frame. The padding is placed on top of that. In the past, this would have been a layer of horsehair and then a layer of wool, but today, layers of synthetic materials would be built up over the support until they were thick enough to provide the necessary amount of comfort.
A contemporary chair or sofa may have multiple levels of comfort, such as seat cushions and back pillows. Cushions are not always necessary, especially with handcrafted made-good furniture that uses furniture upholstery techniques to stuff the seat to an exceptionally high level of comfort.
