Antique English Oak Chair Repair

Chair before restoration

One of my recent repairs was that of an old “Jacobean style” chair (I’m using quotations here because it’s notactually a chair from the Jacobean period, but an old copy). When I first saw the chair in the drafting room of the historic home it occupies, it was upright and complete, although it did lean a little. Upon closer examination, it was completely unsound and all of the joints except for one on the stretchers were loose or broken. The only thing holding them together was the seat webbing!

Loose stretchers

Broken stretcher rail

Broken leg joint

In order to disassemble the chair, the upholstery around the seat had to be removed as did the webbing. This proved to be a tedious and time-consuming task since there were hundreds and hundreds of large staples that had to be gently removed so that the upholstery fabric could be reused. For this job I used a tool called a tack-lifter. In the picture below you can see the layers of cushioning and webbing used for the seat support.

Carefully removing upholstery and filler

Once the upholstery and webbing were removed, the chair could be dismantled and the joints could be repaired. Though the chair was styled as Jacobean (1603-1690) the dowel joinery certainly places it somewhere after the introduction of woodworking machines (1830-present). There are other clues in this chair that point to its creation somewhere in the first years of the 20th century.

All of the dowels and dowel holes were worn beyond re-use and had to be re-cut and re-bored to ensure a tight fit. All the joints were re-glued with hot hide glue as they had been originally.

Since the jute seat webbing had to be removed from the chair frame, new webbing had to be stretched over using a tool called a webbing stretcher. Unlike the previous upholstery, I used traditional tacks to fasten the webbing in the French style of covering the whole frame with webbing in a herringbone weave pattern. In the pictures below, you can see that there are no spaces between the webbing and the tacks are arranged in the traditional “W” or “M” pattern.

Jute Webbing applied in the “French” style.

After the webbing was in place, the seat cushioning was placed on top, then the decorative fabric was pulled over and worked until the surface was smooth and uniform. Finally, the decorative double piping was hand stitched around the perimeter to finish off the edge of the frame. The final touch ups included matching some discoloration with stain and gluing a loose finial on the chair back. You can see a video of this restoration onYouTube.

Repaired English Oak Chair