. With upholstery costs of £1,250 this is not an inexpensive sofa. Yet it would be difficult to get something similar on the high street. Comparison-wise, a large sofa from a mid-range high-street store could easily cost a couple of thou){kind=link}
Reupholstering a tired chair or sofa gives you something special and unique – and it’s much cheaper than buying new
If you choose to shop for a sofa on the high street, there are obvious advantages of speed, transparency and ease. You’ll probably find a colour you like and a shape and size that suits your room. But if you are seeking out a chair that truly delights you, a piece of furniture where impact outweighs cost – well, you may have to be a little more imaginative.
In Lisa Mehydene’s newly renovated Cotswold barn, there is a showstopper sofa that scores top marks for impact, but a quick glance is enough to ascertain that this was no high-street purchase. The wavy-backed antique Victorian sofa was actually a £250 eBay find; and while it was once covered in an unbecoming citrus-yellow velvet, it has been freshly upholstered in contrasting fabrics – a stripe, a floral and a linen. It sits facing the woodburner, in front of the double doors that open into the room.
This prominent position meant it had to look good from behind, explains Mehydene. “It needed to be a feature,” she says, so she got creative with its facelift. For the back, she chose a fabric that she had been “longing to use”, a Howe linen cloth, Folie Bergere, with delicate, diagonally running florals. For the arms and front, a simple stripe from the Cloth Shop complements the Howe fabric. And on the seat cushions is a “hardworking” linen, “so the kids can laze around on it”.
The overall effect is aesthetically beautiful, and both softens and modernises the sofa’s vintage bones, but it is also practical: “It looks more interesting because it has different fabrics, but that also really helps with the budget,” says Mehydene. In this case, the stripe was £28 a metre and the linen around £20 a metre, so she only needed three metres of the most expensive Howe fabric (at £120 a metre). With upholstery costs of £1,250 this is not an inexpensive sofa. Yet it would be difficult to get something similar on the high street. Comparison-wise, a large sofa from a mid-range high-street store could easily cost a couple of thousand pounds.