Breathing new life into old furnishings
WHEN Sharon O’Connor started her business, six years ago, she perhaps didn’t envisage using well-worn, blood stained rugby shirts to bring new life to chairs. But her “memory chairs”, as she calls them, have become a speciality of Vintique Upholstery.
Sharon has covered a window seat in Manchester United football shirts for the England defender Luke Shaw and given sporty flair to a chair for Simon Amor, a rugby coach in charge of the England Sevens team.
“Blood stains, grass stains - they are all there,” says Sharon, who is based in Sunbury-on-Thames in Surrey.
“Players ask you to keep them because they remind them of a particularly brutal match.” Crikey. Apparently grown men cry when they see what she’s fashioned from their old shirts.
Sharon, 47, who worked for 18 years in fashion buying and merchandising, re-trained as an upholsterer after being made redundant during the recession in 2010.
Her first workshop was in a beer shed at the back of a pub. It had a corrugated-iron roof and was freezing cold in winter but Sharon was, in her own words, “as happy as a pig in muck”.
Now she is starring as the upholsterer in the new series of the BBC’s Money For Nothing, which started this week.
For those who haven’t seen the show, the premise is this: the team rescues items from the dump, spruces them up and sells them at a profit.
The nation may soon be knocking at Sharon’s neat and tidy studio door. Because she’s masterful at bringing new life to tired old things.
Inside it’s filled with a mixture of gorgeously coloured, freshly upholstered pieces and dogeared furniture that looks as if it had settled into life on a street corner.
One armchair, now resplendent in a starry sky velvet, had a dog bite out of the arm. Another had been on the pavement for weeks in the rain, plaything of a fox. A piano stool now smartly refashioned with a turquoise seat came to her in bits.
But Sharon loves a challenge. The best projects, she says, are the ones when people turn up saying, “I don’t think there is anything you can do,” but She can always does something.
A pouffe on its way to the skip is now shimmering in a pale pink velvet, another wingback chair has been given the full makeover with a sumptuous deep-red quilted velvet. When she set up shop, she had a shed full of finds from pavements and eBay.
Now people come to her with a mixture of what she calls “nostalgia pieces” and items that need pepping up — a family sofa or dingy headboard, for example.
Re-upholstering makes sense now that we are all more conscious about throwing things away. No, it won’t cost you less than buying something new, but you will come away with something you can call your own.
Because the choice of fabrics, colours, textures is enormous, Sharon has boxes and boxes full in her workshop.
Many of her customers are empty-nesters who can now splash out on themselves and their homes — and they aren’t afraid to go to town.
“We’re becoming more confident, which is partly down to Instagram,” says Sharon. Brassier and bolder looks better on the photo sharing app.
So what’s popular now? “Velvet is huge,” says Sharon. “It’s more resilient and technical than it used to be so you can still have a velvet sofa with children or pets in the house.”
She likes Linwood’s range of zippy velvets including a luminous red called Carmine, which is pinned to her mood wall, as well as deep teals and mustards, linwoodfabric.com.
Digitally printed velvets such as those by Rebecca Mills play to the trend for pattern. Mills’ palmy Nature’s Way design is £89 per metre, rebeccajmillsdesigns.com.
Metallics continue to be sought after and are particularly lovely at this time of year when they change colour in the lower autumn light.
Kirkby’s Arco Geometrics collection picks out Art Deco patterns in glinting golds. Fringing is back, especially because it helps to hide ugly legs, and we’re also open to animal print.
Look at House of Hackney for inspiration. If you’re feeling wild, they do a leopard-print fabric called Wild Card and a velvet named Tigre (£120 per metre, houseofhackney.com).
Geometrics also work well, says Sharon. She has done up a chair in a fabric called Origami Rockets by Eley Kishimoto x Kirkby Design, which cost £123.50 per m for the fabric, plus £650 for the work.
Sometimes people arrive with their own vintage fabrics. Sharon restored a well-loved knitting chair with a Liberty print. The chair belonged to a customer’s grandmother and her grandfather had worked in the Liberty printers, so it was fitting.
If you don’t have any likely pieces in your attic, look on Facebook Marketplace, eBay or at car boot sales.
As Sharon’s tagline goes, life is too short for ordinary furniture.