Sorensen leather, and a new-looking Tongue  

I know it's not Eames, or mid-century, but our Nigel Coates TOngue sofa, now neartly 20 years old, is still one of our favorite pieces of furniture.But for the past four or five years I've been growing more and more ashamed of it - it was covered in Alcantara, fake suede, but was getting increasing greasy and nasty. We put off recovering it for a long time, because it only made sense to recover in leather - and the last quote we'd got, in a decent aniline tan, was £1500. Ouch.

In the spring I got a payment I'd been awaiting for a couple of years. So it was now or never. I'd sourced a couple of upholsterers before, this time I spent a morning trying different people - and finally found Castle Upholstery, who do much of the small scale leather work for the original manufacturers, Hitch Mylius. By sourcing the leather separately - from Andrew Muirhead, the leading british tannery for upholstery leather - I managed to shave a third off the price.

THen, disaster, Once the leather arrived, it was poor quality - barbed wire marks, and lots of assymetric streaking. Variation in a hide can be attractive, as long as it's fairly symmetrical around the spine. The Muirhead leathers were patchy - I think because we were one-off purchasers, they'd perhaps sent us some lower quality skins. We had an awkward week or two before they agreed they were indeed sub-standard and refunded the payment.

So. Same time as the Muirhead, we'd also looked at Sorensen leathers. As mentioned on this site, they have supplied the leather for Arne Jacobsen chairs, particularly, the Egg, for the last 50 years. They were pricier than the Muirhead - in the end it turned out we'd bought their most expensive leather, the aniline 5064 Cognac, even nicer than the samples I'd seen. Intriguingly, though, the price for buying direct from them in Denmark was almost exactly [i] one third[/i] the price we were quoted by a leading design shop for the leather alone.

Finally we picked up the baby, yesterday. As you might be able to guess from the shape, this is an exceptionally tricky sofa to recover. We're very happy with the job. I'd definitely recommend [url=castleupholstery.co.uk]Castle Upholstery[/url] if you need a modern sofa recovering - they were a reasonable price, were a delight to deal with, and were really helpful through our problems with Muirhead.

The last picture shows some of the streakiness, altho it's hard to capture on camera.

Now, all we have to do is wait for the first mark or stain!