When buying high quality furniture for your living room, you should make sure that your chair back and chair seat upholstery are of a high standard and not just composed of a foam slab. You would be surprised at how much expensive so-called ‘fine furniture’ is upholstered with foam and faux leather (i.e. plastic!).

This standard of upholstery will not last long, and will soon become uncomfortable. The best way to exemplify how a sofa and chair should be upholstered is done by means of following the example of one well-known upholstered furniture manufacturer – Sherrill Furniture.

Sherrill’s motto is ‘From our hands to your home’, and they stand by that because Sherrill hand-makes its own furniture. Upholstery is done by hand, following traditional techniques as closely as possible. The company manufactures all kinds of chairs and sofas, including sectionals. What we shall be looking at here is how Sherrill Furniture upholsters the bare frames once these have been crafted.

The chair is used an example, though sofas are treated exactly the same:

1. Webbing

The seats are first webbed, using individual lengths of webbing stretched using a stretching tool, and then tacked from side to side with just a small space between them, and then from back to front, these lengths being interwoven with the lateral webbing. It can be done either way, tacking the front to back webs first – the important factor is they are interwoven to offer a high-strength tensile base for the springs.

Backs are not webbed, only sprung. Many years ago the back would also have been webbed then sprung with small springs, or a box spring construction used.

2. Springing

The length and hardness of the coil springs are selected according to the requirement. This takes experience and knowledge according to the depth of the frame and the hardness required. Each spring is laid on top of the webbing, and secured by means of clinch fasteners.

Each spring is then hand tied to its neighbors in eight directions with polyester cord, the cords from side springs being securely tacked down to the bottom rails of the frame. The whole spring layer is now a solid framework. The springs are then covered with a layer of polypropylene fabric to provide a base for the succeeding layers.

 

The back is sprung using lengths of sinuous wire spring running top to bottom, with coated wire attached horizontally to them to prevent turning and keep them correctly oriented. This spring arrangement is also covered with polypropylene fabric.

3. Stuffing

The seat, back and arms where relevant are generally stuffed in a similar way. The stuffing offers a soft base for the final fabric coverings. Common fillings are polyurethane foam, polyester batting and cotton, and while horse hair was used in the old days, synthetics have now by and large taken over. A final layer of cotton or polypropylene fabric is then stretched over the smoothed last layer of filling to provide a smooth base for the final covering.

4. Fabric Covering

Whether leather or a fabric covering has been chosen, the final step in upholstering high quality furniture is to apply that final covering. A very important aspect of this is talking care to match the patterns, and make sure that the pattern flow is maintained between separate pieces of fabric. Thus, the pattern on the seat should flow correctly in line with that on the back.

Sherrill cuts its fabrics by hand so that the craftspeople have full control over this. The different sewing tasks are each carried out by a specialist in that task, using 7 stitches/inch to ensure durability and a long life.

5. Cushions

Many sofas and chairs use cushions as the seating surface rather than the upholstered base itself. High quality furniture requires high quality cushions, and Sherrill commonly uses a high-density reinforced urethane foam core, then covers that all round with a sewn ticking containing a two ounce polyester fiber. Other cushion fillings are available, including comfort-down, spring-down and a high resiliency urethane foam core with a 2.33 ounce fiber casing.

6. Nail Finishings

Many of the Sherrill Furniture products are decorated with old-style antique round-headed nails. These were originally used by early upholsters to cover the heads of the ugly metal tacks use to secure the upholstery. This started before sewing machines were invented and all sewing was by hand – it was generally quicker to fix all the coverings with flat-headed tacks.

These large domed nails were then hammered over the tacks, covering the heads, and producing an attractive finish. Sherrill offer you a choice between 10 different heads in a variety of sizes and spacings. The standard spacing is head to head forming a continuous row of domed nails.

That is fundamentally how high quality furniture chair backs and chair seats are upholstered from the frame out. Although Sherrill Furniture was taken as an example, many other American furniture manufacturers do it in a similar way.