I saw these amazing ..ok, these ratty with amazing potential chairs at an estate sale in Corona Del Mar for a $100 a pair. And after looking them up online (Danish modern..what? They're OLD!) Jesse graciously agreed to go make an offer on them while I was at work. He called me and said that there IS a guy who would buy them and put in his furniture gallery (of old and haunted things, no doubt) but, unfortunately for the guy, and fortunately for me, $75 and a truck right there proved more lucrative than $100 and delivering the chairs to his gallery.
Really, most everything about these chairs was objectionable until you sat in them. They are as comfortable as the orange upholstery was itchy (and ugly). They reminded me of wood armchairs my grandma has in Ukraine, and of the fact that I have no wood armchairs, and, lastly, as usual, "we can always Craigslist/Ebay them". Jesse fell for it again.
So we dragged them home. The underside has "Conant Ball Co" burned/stamped on bottom, which I tried to research, and came up with not much else but that their other ugly for my taste furniture is relatively expensive. Win for my "we can always resell them" argument. They appear to be from the 40's - 50's. A fancy designer named Russel Wright designed a modern line of furniture for CB starting 1935, but my research indicates his fancy name is stamped on his fancy designs, which mine do not have. Then I got bored and gave up on trying to trace the royal lineage; I did, however, come across a guy trying to sell a really ratty one, sans cushions, on CL for $125, so my resale argument is as strong as ever.
They match nothing in the apartment. I'd have to find a place for them. The upholstery HAD to go.
The work in progress - you can see the original hideousness on the other chair. I think I was in such a hurry to strip them off the ugly, that I didn't take a picture of the two in all their burnt orange scratchy glory.
I went to JoAnn's and bought some obscene amount of $2/yd brown cotton fabric. I thought I needed 8 yards. I got 9. I used may be 6. The foam and batting wrap looked pretty good. I fabreezed the cushions, and sewed the covers.
The covers are basically rectangles, I cut up one of the orange hideousnesses and used it as a template. They look better. Or, at least, they try to blend in.
Jesse spotted some brilliant bright purple upholstery fabric at a San Francisco fabric outlet for $6/yd, and it is my plan to eventually make the chairs purple. And put them next to the green curtains (soon to be in progress) and a bright yellow painted wall (as soon as I talk Jesse into it).
Close up of the Purple Fabric lazily draped over chair. The brown set of covers, simple as they were, took me 5 incompetence filled days, so I'm waiting for the second wind.
I may, in the future, also replace the foam; that and a wood soap bath later they'll be like brand new. I love old stuff, but I also have an acute other-people-dead-skin-cell obsession that goes wild when untreated. I usually treat it by asking Jesse to refinish stuff (a good bath in Liquid Sandpaper leaves very little behind. Including your own live skin, if you're not careful), but he's backed up on projects, so I soaped it as well I could, and they're waiting in queue.
Update!! I was right, and the purple looks a m a z i n g against the Yellow Wall!
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