Antique Restoration

For years Summerfield’s has been locally renowned as the go to place to get your antique chairs and sofas restored. Not only do we rebuild the upholstery in a traditional manner, if the frame is loose or broken and if the polish needs reviving or redoing we can address it. Pulling apart an old frame often takes skill and experience.

It’s not unusual to find that the joints have had nails, screws and even dowels angled into them and getting them out without smashing the original joint can be problematic. When unprofessional novice repairers drive such things into a joint, they are making it worse, not better. Pumping new glue into a joint without first removing the old glue is useless as well.

The joint might seem strong for a short while, but eventually the new glue peels away from the old and you're back to a loose joint with a messy build-up of gunk in it. These are things we see time and time again and in most cases the unprofessional repair just makes more work for us. Once we have carefully pulled the frame apart, we remove the old glue from the joints, dowels, mortise and tenons etc. Broken dowels, tenons, cracked rails, borer damage, etc. are all attended to and the frame is re-glued and clamped overnight.

We like our repairs to be as good as the day the antique was made! Many old chairs have brass and porcelain castors (wheels) on them that have become loose, wobbly and bent over the years. This can cause damage and complete breakage of the bottom of the leg. Brass and china castors are still available and we are able to fit them securely. Sometimes bits of wooden carving might be missing. We can repair, or arrange repair of broken carvings, legs, balloon backs, etc. Where possible we try to match the original timber with, or close to the same.

Polish revival, conservation and repolishing

The majority of antique furniture we see has been polished with shellac. With the right treatment it’s not unusual that a very old polish can be revived and restored, whilst retaining the antique patina. Then we treat the finish with a bees wax polish to nourish and conserve the restored shellac. When the polish is beyond reviving due to oxidising or too much damage we can arrange stripping and traditional re-polishing. We avoid using modern lacquers and NEVER put estapol on antique furniture.