Velvet Revival Inspired by Katsutoshi Yuasa

Is a worn antique chair worth restoring?

A worn chair is worth restoring when its structure has outlasted its surface. The Veridian Grove, a George III style wingback found at the back of a Los Angeles thrift shop, had lost its covering and its finish but kept the one thing a new covering cannot supply: its proportion.

It had sat unsold at a reduced price, and the staff spoke of setting it aside. What most people walked past was surface, and surface was the part that had failed. The frame beneath it had not. The wings still curved inward, tall and upright on long tapered legs, the line of a chair built to hold a reader at length rather than to fill a room.

The Veridian Grove, restored: a George III style wingback reupholstered in Black Edition Kensu printed velvet, the show-wood refinished to a dark tone.

That is the test applied before any work begins, where restoration begins with recognition: not what a piece has become, but what it has not lost. Proportion cannot be restored into an object. It is either present or it is gone. In the Veridian Grove it was present, and the rest followed from there.

Not every worn chair earns the work. When a frame is broken through, when the joints have let go and the structure itself is gone, bringing it back becomes reconstruction, and a reconstructed chair is a newer object wearing an older look. The line worth drawing sits right there: restore what use has proven, and rebuild only what you are willing to say aloud you rebuilt.

What the Frame Kept

The form is George III style: a serpentine crest, out-scrolled arms, square tapered and fluted front legs, raked rear legs. Its exact date is not recorded, and the upholstered frame carries no maker's mark, so the piece is offered as George III style rather than fixed to a period. Its earlier history is not recorded either. What the chair does carry is wear, and wear is evidence of a kind. It accumulates unevenly because a chair is handled unevenly, marking where hands returned and where a body settled. Read that way, a chair holds a record of use the way a photograph holds a pose. The Veridian Grove had that record and little else.

The chair as it arrived: a pink covering with brass nailhead trim, the show-wood worn. The fluting on the front legs reads most clearly here.

A photograph in the Acanthus Home archive, taken in Japan in 1917, holds four figures at a table in exactly that way. It records not who they were but that they were there, together, at a particular hour. The Veridian Grove enters the same kind of record, not through provenance but through use.

Japan, 1917. A photograph from the Acanthus Archive.

Restoration here was continuity, not disguise. The frame was prepared for continued use and its stance left unaltered. The show-wood was refinished to a dark tone, bringing up a luster the grime had hidden. Nothing ornamental was added, and the brass nailhead trim of the earlier covering was not kept. What was preserved was not a perfect surface but the conditions that let the chair do again what it was built to do.\

The Cloth and the Woodblock

For the covering, the chair was reupholstered in Black Edition Kensu, a printed jacquard velvet in the Viridian colourway. It reads as mottled teal-blue and ivory, with metallic highlights worked into the pile, and its design is drawn from an abstracted woodland scene by the Japanese artist Katsutoshi Yuasa. The pattern does not present an image so much as an atmosphere. Motif gives way to depth, and the surface shifts with light and distance.

Yuasa works in woodblock. An image is carved into wood, inked, and printed, often in layers, so that it accrues slowly through repetition rather than arriving all at once. A velvet drawn from that method suits a chair asked to be lived with. Both reward duration, and the cloth is rated for regular domestic use, chosen for a seat meant to be sat in rather than kept at a distance.

Black Edition Kensu, a printed jacquard velvet whose design is drawn from the woodblock work of Katsutoshi Yuasa.

What was nearly discarded now holds a place again. The Veridian Grove was not made new; it was kept in use. That is the difference restoration can make, and the difference worth paying for: not a chair disguised as something it never was, but a structure carried forward past the surface that failed it.

The Veridian Grove after restoration, photographed in a bedroom setting.

Object in this Journal

The Veridian Grove. A George III style wingback chair, reupholstered in Black Edition Kensu printed velvet and refinished for continued use. Acquire This Piece

See more of the collection's restored antique seating.

‍Related reading

The Language of Threads: choosing a fabric to reupholster an antique chair.

Reading Furniture Like a Text: how to read wear and patina.

‍Thoughtfully Collected. Quietly Shared.