Velvet Revival Inspired by Katsutoshi Yuasa

It was nearly discarded.

At the back of a Los Angeles thrift shop, the chair sat untouched. Its rayon upholstery was saturated with grime, its surface dulled beyond appeal. Even at a reduced price, it remained unsold. The staff spoke casually of setting it aside.

Most people passed it without pause.

What endured was the structure. An early twentieth-century wingback, tall and restrained, its proportions remained intact. The wings curved inward, not to display, but to receive. It belonged to a period when domestic seating encoded posture and duration, when chairs were designed to hold the body through time rather than announce themselves in space.

At Acanthus Home, restoration begins with recognition. Not of surface, but of form. Veridian Grove was selected not for what it had become, but for what it had not lost. Proportion remained. Presence remained. The frame still carried the memory of use.

Intervention came just before erasure.

Repair, in this context, is neither disguise nor correction. It is continuity. What is preserved is not perfection, but the conditions that once allowed the object to function as intended.

In 1917, my great-grandfather traveled to Japan. He appears seated at a table among hosts dressed in kimono. The chair itself is undocumented. The posture remains. Design survives not only as object, but as record of relation: who sat, how long, and in whose company.

Veridian Grove now enters that continuum. Not through provenance, but through use.

The frame was stabilized without altering its stance. The wood was hand-finished, revealing luster long concealed by neglect. Nothing ornamental was added. Nothing extraneous removed.

For upholstery, a jacquard velvet inspired by the monoprint work of Katsutoshi Yuasa was selected. The textile does not present an image so much as an atmosphere. Pattern dissolves into depth. Shadow overtakes motif. The surface shifts with light and distance.

Yuasa’s process begins with carved wood, inked and pressed through repetition. Image emerges slowly, through accumulation. His compositions reside between legibility and disappearance. Upholstering Veridian Grove in a textile drawn from that method binds object and process. Both resist immediacy. Both reward duration.

What was nearly discarded now holds space again.

Beauty, here, is not reclaimed through transformation.
It is restored through continuity.