How vintage leather furniture is professionally restored

• Furniture Clinic specializes in leather cleaning, repairing, and restoration.
• Its lead technician, Steven Aiston, walks us through the process of restoring this 40-year-old chesterfield leather armchair.
• He'll focus on repairing the cracks from normal wear and tear and restoring the color back to an antique red with a two-tone, glossy effect that is signature to a chesterfield chair.

The following is a transcript of the video.

Steven Aiston: Hi. My name's Steven. Today we're gonna walk through how to restore a leather chesterfield. This chesterfield chair we have in has got a lot of grease marks on the arms, scratches on the seats, and grease marks on the head areas. We're just gonna be restoring it to its original look. [scrubbing] So, to start off the process, we'll always clean down the sofa with the Ultra Clean, basically just a leather cleaner. This removes all the dirt and grease, any oils on the surface. This customer liked the old antique look, so we would need to mask the studs off just to stop them from getting any overspray on them so they don't get damaged when we're doing the repair process.

The next stage is the leather prep. So, before we restore the color, we will need to remove the existing finishing coatings from the leather. The leather prep does this, and it allows us to extract all the cracks and the oils from the sofa. It can also remove any sort of cracking that's in the painting coating. Some areas that have cracking might be in the actual leather, but the leather prep can sometimes remove all of the cracking from the existing painted coatings. This can be seen on the arm areas here.

We will then apply the leather degreaser to the hand areas and the head areas and any areas that are feeling greasy. This is because they get all of the natural contact with the skin, so all of the oils from the head and the hands, they'll soak through into the leather. This is an essential part of the process. If the oils aren't removed from the heads and the hand areas, then the colorant won't stick, when we come to that stage. So what we are doing here is putting the degreaser paste on and letting it dry. It may take an hour or two to dry. So, as it dries, it dries into a white powder. If this powder dries a yellow or a greasy color, this means it'll need another coat applied. Once it is dry, if it is all white, then that means all of the grease has been removed.

So, once we are happy that all the leather degreaser has worked, we will then clean it off again. This is essential just to get all of the remaining grease and dirt and all the bits of leather degreaser that's still in the buttons or that might have got into the leather. We will need to remove these with the Ultra Clean again. We will then need to remove all the grime and the dirt from inside of the buttons. We do this with compressed air. This is so we can get right underneath the buttons and the hard-to-reach areas. So, the alcohol cleaner is the next part of the process. This neutralizes the leather surface. It removes all the silicons that may not be soluble in the leather prep, so it's important to use alcohol cleaner to ensure the repair products adhere properly. Then we will move on to the repair.

Cracks will happen with just general wear and tear and constant pressure on the leather, which will crack the existing finish and will crack the color from the leather. We'll be using the leather binder to fix some of these cracks. So, the leather binder is just a thin liquid, and it's used for strengthening heavily worn or cracked leather. It just soaks deep into the fibers and repairs minor scuffs. As you can see, on these arms we have a few minor scuffs, which the leather binder will be able to repair. Sanding the job down is also a vital part of the process. This is to ensure that the leather gets a nice smooth feel to it. We need to constantly run our hand around the leather sofa, just to feel we've got all the right areas with our sanding pads. So, if you've gone further down the line and one area hadn't been sanded, we would then have to use a heavier sanding pad, which then might remove the existing color that we've already sprayed on, which would then mean we would have to go back to that stage. So it's very important that we keep on top of the sanding.

The toughest part of this restoration is probably going to be the arms, as they've got a bit of cracking on. And maybe the outside back. Has some quite small tears, so we're gonna have to use some flexi filler to try and repair these areas. It dries clear, so it's easily colored over. This can take just a few minutes to dry. We will apply just enough pressure with a palette knife so that the flexible filler covers all of the damaged area. The excess is then removed so it doesn't cause a ridge around it and so the surface is nice and smooth. Once we are happy it is fully filled, we will then dry the area and then move on to the next stage.

[spraying] So, the base color is applied to the chair first. The base color on this chair is called an antique red. We have this color saved in our database, as it's the most common color on an antique chesterfield. And the majority of chesterfields have the antique red base and the antique topcoat. So, the antique red base color is applied with light coats using a gravity-fed spray gun. We will slowly build it up until we are happy that it has a full base color on. We will dry in between every single coat and repeatedly sand, just to give the leather a nice smooth feel. Once we are happy with the base color, we will then move on to the buttons.

As you can see, we need to darken the buttons down. All of the chesterfield buttons are always dark. So, after we've sprayed the antique red base color on, we'll then apply the antique topcoat. We start with the buttons, and then we'll move on to the pleats. As we darken the pleats, it creates a diamond effect, which we will then color in with a topcoat, allowing the base color to come through the sofa. Gives it that antique two-tone effect. The leather finish is applied last. The leather finish we are using here is a gloss. It's a signature of chesterfield sofas and gives it that antique look. [soft music]