We have a great leather couch from Mitchell and Gold that we paid a huge amount for years ago. The couch is structurally in good shape, but some of the leather has started to fall apart… and since we paid thousands for this thing, figure it’s worth redoing.
I have been trying for months to find an upholstery place to redo this couch, and all of them say they can’t redo a leather couch. Somehow I would have thought in L.A., there’d be someone to help, but nope…
Pretty soon it’s going to have to go to landfill at this rate, and it’s off to IKEA for a cheap couch, unless I can save this one that I still love.
Has anyone ever had a leather couch reupholstered? I had no idea it would be virtually impossible… At this point, we’d even think about getting it recovered as a fabric couch if someone would do it…
You can get leather “patches” that are adhesive, not very expensive, if you can’t find anyone to fix it and want to try and coax a few more years out of it.
I did this with a set of leather armchairs I have, when one of them got ripped early on. I ordered a set of patches off Amazon, patched the chair up, and haven’t had any more issues with it, eight or ten years later. The patches have kind of faded into the leather now and are pretty hard to see. I guess the pressure of people sitting on them.
As far as having someone actually reupholster the entire thing, would it be possible to speak with the furniture company you bought it from? Maybe they have a custom furniture order shop that could help you out? I feel pretty certain that it ain’t gonna be cheap, though
I’d never thought of that… that might work while I see about getting the whole thing done…
It was originally bought at Restoration Hardware, (Yeah, we used to have money… now we’re down to patching things!) and they’ve always been useless… But maybe I should email the furniture maker and ask if they have suggestions… I hadn’t thought of that either…
Here is a link to a place in LA. I just chose one of the first links off of the list. I used “leather furniture repair in Los Angeles” as a search term. It looks like you’ll have plenty to choose from.
Stay away from upholstery places, and go straight to leather specialists.
I would nit be at all surprised if you discovered this costs more than the original couch. Both in terms of parts and labor, it’s a significant portion of what went into the couch in the firat place and you don’t get all the advantages of economies of scale/division of labor the original shop had.
I live across the country from you. I had a leather couch reupholstered a few years ago. It came out great, and I’m thrilled. I’m lying on it right now as I type.
I paid about as much as a new couch would have cost, but I really liked this couch, and it fit my smallish room. Furniture has gotten much larger in recent years, and this was one of the last of the smaller ones. The people who did the reupholstery said that about half their customers cited “it fits in the space I have” as the reason to repair their furniture, rather than buy new.
So maybe it’s the frequency of older homes with smaller rooms in this corner of the country that supports leather reupholstery here. I’m surprised you can’t find someone, but I agree with others who said you may pay more to fix it than to buy a cheap new one.
Funny, you picked one of the places I had originally contacted. They were really nice, but told me they didn’t really work on leather couches… I remember thinking they’d be great when I originally found them… Maybe they are… just not for me…
