Restore before replace
The member who complains about the chair also owns it.
Private club furniture services in NYC. Club chairs, dining seating and lounge furniture repaired, restored or recovered, worked on the club's calendar and in the rooms they belong to.
Who the furniture belongs to
A club is the only client whose customers own the chairs.
In a restaurant the seating belongs to an operator and a worn chair is a cost. In a club it belongs to the membership, so the member who reports a chair is also, in part, the person buying the repair. Three things follow.
Members remember the chair.
Replacing a room is a decision the membership sees. Restoring the same frames is not. The first question here is always what can be kept.
The buyer is a committee.
An estimate is read by people who never saw the damage. It has to hold up on paper, room by room, with nobody there to explain it.
The match gets inspected.
A member sits in the repaired chair and looks at the one beside it. Close enough passes in a hotel lobby and fails in a card room.
Where a clubhouse wears
Every room in a clubhouse fails in its own way.
- 01
Grill room and bar
Stools and low-back chairs take more sittings a day than anything else in the building. Seams go at the front edge, and the foot rail wears every stool base at the same height.
- 02
Main dining room
Chairs are moved and re-set for every service, so damage lands on the outside back and the arm tops, where staff handle them rather than where members sit. Usually pigmented leather or upholstery fabric.
- 03
Card and game rooms
Deep-buttoned club chairs sit under lamps for hours. The colour thins at the arm rolls long before anything tears, which is why full-grain leather is worth restoring rather than replacing.
- 04
Locker rooms and halfway house
Sunscreen, sweat and wet golf clothes. The one room where the cover is chosen for cleaning rather than for looks, so it is usually performance fabric or a coated vinyl.
- 05
Lounges and terrace rooms
Sun through a wall of glass fades one side of a room and not the other. A set that matched when it went in stops matching, and no piece looks wrong until you carry one across.
The same club, two registers. A repaired piece has to match the room it stands in.
Four services, one question
How much of the original survives decides what you are buying.
Clubs want the most conservative answer that will hold. Here is that ladder, in order.
Club furniture repair
The frame and the cover are both sound and the damage is local. A split seam, a tear at the front edge, a chair gone loose in the joint.
Club furniture restoration
The hide is original and worth keeping. Colour and finish come back on the leather already on the frame, which is the answer members like best.
Club furniture reupholstery
The cover has gone past saving but the frame has not. New cover, same chair, back in the same room.
Dining and lounge seating reupholstery
The room rather than the chair. A whole set recovered together so nothing in it comes back reading newer than anything else.
Before the committee meets
What house committees ask first.
How much do private club furniture services in NYC cost?
We do not price club work from a description, because the same photograph can be a seam repair on one chair or a full recover of a whole set. What moves the number is how many pieces are involved, whether the original hide can be kept or has to be replaced, how closely the result has to match the pieces you are not touching, and whether we are working around the club calendar. Send photographs of the worst piece and of the room it sits in, and you will get a figure against that room rather than a range.
When can the work happen without closing a room?
Most of it goes in outside member hours, which is easier to plan at a club than at a restaurant because the calendar is set well in advance. Repairs and restoration happen in the room itself, overnight or on a closed day. A full recover of a dining room or a lounge is staged across a quiet stretch, or taken a block of chairs at a time so the room stays open while it is under way.
Our club chairs are old and no longer made. Is restoring them really better than replacing them?
Usually, and not only on cost. A club chair of that kind sits on a frame worth keeping, and the leather on it has aged into a colour a new hide does not have. Members recognise those chairs, so replacing them is a decision the membership sees and restoring them is not. We will tell you when a piece is genuinely past saving, because some are.
Can the work be split across budget years?
Yes, and often it should be. The usual split is by room, so each stage is a complete thing the committee can approve and then see finished, rather than a fraction of a building. The one thing to plan for is matching: when a set is going to be recovered in stages, we record the specification at the first stage so the last chairs come back the same as the first.
Start with the piece members mention
Show us the chair, and the room around it.
One photograph of the piece and one of the room tell us whether it is a repair, a restoration or a recover. Work goes in outside member hours, sets are planned a room at a time, or call (347) 310-7483.
