Where Can I Get a Chair Reupholstered in NYC?

What Actually Makes a Chair Worth Recovering

The frame is the whole decision. If the chair is hardwood, joined rather than stapled, and doesn't rack side to side when you push on the back, it's almost always worth recovering, because that frame is the expensive part and you already own it. Plenty of the chairs that come through our shop are built better than anything you could buy new at the same price. That's usually why people hung onto them in the first place.

Age helps here rather than hurts. The inherited wingback, the pair of bergères from an estate sale, the club chair somebody's grandmother bought in 1962: those were all built on the assumption that someone would recover them eventually. It's why the fabric is tacked instead of glued, and why the seat comes apart the way it does.

The chairs we turn down are the ones where the frame itself has given up. A chair that's been re-glued three times, or one with a cracked rear leg where it meets the seat rail, can be repaired, but the repair starts costing more than the chair is worth to you. We'll say so when we look at it, and we'd much rather say it before you've paid for fabric.

How This Works When You Live in an Apartment

This is the part that's genuinely different in New York, and it's usually what people are actually asking about when they go looking for a shop.

Most quotes here start with a photo. Send a picture of the chair from the front and one from the side, tell us how many chairs and what floor you're on, and you get a written quote the same day with labor and fabric yardage listed separately. Nothing gets picked up before you've seen that number in writing.

Drop-in dining seats are the easy case. The seat lifts out with four screws, and for a set of six we can often do the whole thing in one visit without the chairs ever leaving your dining room. Tufted backs, spring seats and fully upholstered wingbacks are workshop jobs, so those get picked up and brought back.

Building logistics come up on nearly every job and they're routine for us. If your building wants a certificate of insurance before the freight elevator gets used, tell us when you call and we'll send one to management ahead of the pickup date. If you're in a brownstone with a tight turn at the second landing, mention it, because that changes how we wrap the chair rather than whether we can do it at all. We carry furniture down Brooklyn and Manhattan stairwells every week, and the same care goes into upholstery repair jobs where only part of the piece needs work.

Choosing Fabric Without Guessing

You can supply your own fabric or pick from our books, and either way the yardage gets settled before you order anything. Customer supplied fabric, which the trade calls COM, is common on our jobs. Tell us the width and the pattern repeat and we'll tell you exactly how many yards to buy. Ordering two yards short on a discontinued fabric is a genuinely painful way to learn that lesson.

A single armchair generally runs five to seven yards. A set of six drop-in dining seats takes about four to six yards total, which surprises people who assumed six chairs meant six times the fabric. Large repeats need more, sometimes a lot more, and that goes in the quote rather than turning up as a surprise later.

If the chair lives somewhere punishing, say so up front. A kitchen with small kids, a west facing window that gets brutal afternoon sun, a dog with strong opinions about where he sleeps. Performance fabrics and commercial vinyls have come a long way, and most of them no longer look like they belong in a waiting room.

Getting a Set to Match

Sets are their own small problem. When two chairs out of eight have failed and the other six are holding up fine, recovering just the two almost never works, because those six have been fading in place for years and the new fabric will read as new for a long time.

There are a few honest ways through it. You can recover the whole set at once, which costs more up front but less per chair than doing it in stages, since the setup is shared. You can recover the failed chairs in a deliberately different fabric and make it look like a decision, which works nicely on the head chairs at the ends of a table. Or if the original fabric is somehow still in production, match it exactly and live with the new ones reading a shade brighter for a season.

We quote sets per chair so you can see what each of those actually costs before you commit to one. For dining chairs especially, chair reupholstery tends to be the fastest and least disruptive work we do.

What to Ask Before You Hand Over a Chair

A few questions sort a working shop from a middleman pretty quickly, and none of them are rude to ask.

Ask whether the quote separates labor from fabric. A single bundled number makes it impossible to tell what you're paying for, or to compare two shops honestly. Ask what happens to the seat underneath, because new fabric stretched over compressed foam and tired webbing is a cosmetic fix, and it'll feel exactly the same to sit in six months from now. Ask who does the work and where it happens. Ask about timing too, which for most chairs runs two to four weeks from pickup and depends far more on fabric lead time than on the labor.