Breathing new life into an armchair destined for landfill

Today’s MEET THE CREATIVE guest post – meet Polly Granville, saving upholstery from landfill in the most beautiful way possible!

I found Polly via a really obscure freelancers’ facebook group, and tracked down her instagram account to connect – turns out we both know Ruth Eaton, so I knew she was a good-en – I invited Polly to write about her work here on incredibusy.com as I have a passion for repair – beyond darning socks…. so, here’s Polly, who is breathing new life into an armchair destined for landfill as we speak.

Inspired by her Mother

Starting an upholstery short course as a means of carving a little bit of time for herself away from being a full-time mum, Polly Granville had watched her own mum upholster for several years so knew the hard graft it took to make a chair, but she was immediately smitten and 18 years later she has a flourishing business and still uses her Mum’s upholstery tools.

Early on the course she realised that she wanted to be more creative with the chairs – working with different fabrics on different faces, putting in cross stitch patterns and embroidered motifs to tie in with the patterned fabrics etc. This soon led to sourcing historical images for digital printing and creating completely unique pieces. Bearing in mind this was 17 years ago, there wasn’t so much of it around and so it got quite a lot of interest leading to her being dubbed “A Seating Couturier” by House and Garden Magazine.

Second Sitters Exhibition

As the domestic upholstery side of the business went from strength to strength, the one-off pieces took a back seat. But some wonderful opportunities arose to showcase more innovative work. Polly worked with Traces London to put modern artworks into historical buildings like Fenton House in Hampstead and with Second Sitters as part of their trailblazing Upholstery: Evolution to Revolution exhibition that showed at both the Geffyre Museum and The National Centre for Craft and Design.

Now the business is a happy mix of both domestic and commercial upholstery – Polly has a team of craftspeople helping her transform both modern and antique furniture back into something both beautiful and useful!

Using Chelsea Harbour as her fabric library, one of the USPs of the business, is offering a bespoke fabric finding service. In terms of recycling and upcyling its difficult to use the companies offering smaller offcuts as often  between 7-20m is needed for a large armchair or sofa. But she has a great little side hustle offering the clients the chance to browse all the fabric remnants at the workshop if they have a smaller project and that’s helping to reduce waste.  She also makes and sells beautiful scatter cushions from interesting leftovers enhanced with decorative trims and borders.

Flame retardant chemicals

There is a great push for sustainability in the world of upholstery. So, if it balances with a client’s budget, Polly is promoting using latex or rubberised horsehair instead of foam and switching to pure wool scatter cushions rather than fibre or feather. Part of the eco drive is to try and remove the need for Fire retardant chemicals on many projects – led by the totally brilliant Delyth Featherstone – we have the most stringent laws in the world and the chemicals are toxic so wherever possible Polly uses a fabric with a high natural content therefore removing the need for FR treatment.

Melanie Porter collaboration

The very latest news from Polly’s Brixton workshop is that she is teaming up with the wonderful Melanie Porter to bring back Melanie’s iconic knitted chairs, watch this space!

Before and After

We all love a before and after, this armchair literally fell apart when Polly took the old covers off! It was reupholstered traditionally. Webbed, Four-way hand tied springs, then hessian and fibre stuffing hand stitched edge.

“The client absolutely loved it, and I was loath to let it leave my workshop.”

If anyone would like to know more, please get in touch with Polly at www.pollygranville.com
and follow Polly on instagram here for more up to date upholstery repair stories.

Fabric library reference: Chelsea Harbour and also Surplus fabrics from hainescollection.co.uk and also Renee Materials for smaller projects.