Upholstery is so much more than a padded piece of furniture set into a room. It’s the quiet spot on a weekend afternoon where a cup of tea, a soft throw and a good book make a roomy chaise your favorite go-to corner. It’s the larger-than-life sectional during family movie night when the newest flick that’s streaming and popcorn send everyone running for its sumptuous seats. It’s the sofa that serves as the foundation for a good gab with a girlfriend over a glass of wine on any given night.
There was a time in the American mind-set when furniture was chosen because it was built to last. We are determined to bring back this point of view because the special moments within your home that we mention above deserve a foundation of stability that begins with long-lasting construction techniques. If the frame is built strongly, the suspension system securely fashioned and installed, the padding of the best quality and the upholstery materials such that they will only grow more beautiful with age, all of the memories you’ve made seated on our cushions will come flooding back for years to come.
Here are a few details about our construction that can offer you the assurance that we’re creating furniture to hold up under the myriad activities a busy life brings with it:
Tempered steel coil spring drop in unit:
The suspension system that underpins a piece of upholstered furniture is what buoys the body when it is eased onto the seat. There are many different types of suspensions and we choose to support our chairs, sofas, sectionals and chaises with tempered-steel coil-spring drop-in units. These are composed of coils that are mounted on a metal frame, which is “dropped into” the furniture as a single piece.
Hardwood and hardwood laminate frame with corner-block joinery:
To ensure that the foundation of a piece of our upholstery won’t warp or crack, we make all of our frames from hardwood and hardwood laminate. To provide further stability, we use corner-block joinery on our frames, which means when there is a corner, an extra piece of wood is placed at an angle and fastened into place with staples and glue to create a seriously tight joint.
Trust is an important word in our vernacular at Hand & Grain, and it is what we set out to cultivate with our clients who depend upon our furniture to make their special moments magical. We have this in mind each time we take up a nail gun, polish the surface of a leather hide, tuck a seam into a welt or place padding into a beautifully sewn cushion. Each of these steps—and so many more—coalesce to create a foundation of stability for the happenings that make each of your lives memorable.
[Lead image by Samantha Hurley.]