15% off + Free Shipping on $99. Selecting the Best Look and Fit Now that you’ve invited Ashley HomeStore into your home, you’ll want to enjoy the furnishings for years to come. To ensure that you do, we encourage you to follow through with proper care and cleaning. This useful guide covers all types of furniture—from upholstered to painted—and mattresses and rugs. We offer countless options in upholstery—from fine leather and skillfully matched manmade alternatives (faux leather), to cotton, nylon, polyester, rayon and wool blends. For your reference, our upholstered products have a tag either under one of the seat cushions or beneath the unit itself. The tag provides a universal cleaning code indicating best cleaning practices. Leather isn’t perfect and that’s the beauty of it. All leather or “genuine” leather has natural markings, including variations of shade and tone, as well as nicks, scratches and wrinkles—characteristics that distinguish it from manmade materials.
Expect that some marks will appear on the surface of your leather. Their origin might be anything from healed scars and barbed wire scratches, to skin “stretch marks” and insect bites. By no means should they be considered a defect; nor will they affect the durability or construction of your piece. Such “imperfections” are your assurance that you have a true leather hide. Also keep in mind, grain patterns and coloring of leather will vary from hide to hide and also within the same hide, making leather all the more interesting and unique. A water spot can be removed by wiping the entire area seam to seam with a damp cloth so there is no “demarcation point” on the leather and the leather can dry uniformly. We recommend “Natures Miracle" available in pet stores for removing pet urine stains and neutralizing the area. Follow product directions on the product. Please note that anytime you are “washing” or cleaning leather you must do the entire cushion, seam to seam, edge to edge, so as not to end up with a water stain.
If leather can dry evenly there is no "demarcation point.” Ink remover sticks are effective in removing or reducing noticeable ink markings from most leathers. Small oil stains can be treated and successfully removed if addressed immediately. Rub corn starch briskly into the stain with your fingers until the heat from the friction is felt. That heat loosens the oil and allows the corn starch to absorb the oil before the leather can. Vacuum or brush the powder off. Repeat until the stain is gone. What does it take to clean water stains? Should you have a “ring” or demarcation from glass condensation from a glass, soak a new sponge with room temperature water; wring sponge as much as possible. Starting at the spot, dampen the leather and move the sponge to the edges of the cushion. Allow moisture to become less and less as you get further from the spot. Don’t scrub, just wipe. Whether you have an all-wood piece of furniture or a furnishing made of a mix of wood, manmade wood and wood veneer, you want to protect it from damage, maintain its perfect finish and keep it looking beautiful for years to come.
Here are some tips to help you do that. Nothing opens up a room like the beauty and transparency of glass. Of course, you’re so careful not to break it. But you don’t want to dull it or scratch it, either. A few simple steps can clearly go a long way. Whether to inject a rustic element or give a piece of furniture a modern, industrial flair, at Ashley HomeStore, we incorporate metal in our furniture in so many ways. Much of the metal you’ll find is powdercoated, resulting in a smooth, even surface. Colorful and unique, hand-painted furniture is a great way to express your individual style. It’s important to place these furnishings out of direct sunlight so the color and vibrancy of the painted finish remains fresh and crisp. Natural stone such as marble and slate brings an earthy, organic element into a space. They’re universally loved for their one-of-a-kind quality. From piece to piece, and even on a single quarried slab, there will be certain color variations.
Stone surfaces will have pits and fissures that appear as cracks. They result from immense heat and pressure, which formed the stone eons ago. These characteristics do not impair function or durability; rather they add to the beauty. And while marble, slate and natural stone are certainly quite durable, by no means should be treated as indestructible. Liquid Spills: Blot away the excess liquid with a clean, dry, white cloth; turning the cloth frequently. Spray the area with a marble cleaner or warm water and wipe. Food Spills: Remove food with a non-abrasive item such as a plastic spoon. Blot with dry, white cloth. Spray the area with a marble cleaner and wipe. How to care for your Ashley HomeStore rug? That depends on what it’s made of. Some rugs are fine to spot clean. Others, such as our polypropylene or wool rugs, should be dry cleaned only. So please check the cleaning instructions on the corner tag located beneath your rug for best results. Rest easy with the fact that your Ashley-Sleep® mattress doesn’t require much care and maintenance.
For starters, all Ashley-Sleep mattresses are designed to be no flip—now isn’t that a relief! A New England easy chair at the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate in Delaware Upholstery is the work of providing furniture, especially seats, with padding, springs, webbing, and fabric or leather covers. The word upholstery comes from the Middle English word upholder,[1] which referred to a tradesman who held up his goods. The term is equally applicable to domestic, automobile, airplane and boat furniture, and can be applied to mattresses, particularly the upper layers, though these often differ significantly in design. A person who works with upholstery is called an upholsterer; an apprentice upholsterer is sometimes called an outsider or trimmer. Traditional upholstery uses materials like coil springs (post-1850), animal hair (horse, hog and cow), coir, straw and hay, hessians, linen scrims, wadding, etc., and is done by hand, building each layer up. In contrast, modern upholsterers employ synthetic materials like dacron and vinyl, serpentine springs, and so on.
George Jacob Hunzinger, Armchair, designed 1869. Patented March 30, 1869. Upholder is an archaic term used for "upholsterer", but it appears to have a connotation of repairing furniture rather than creating new upholstered pieces from scratch (cobbler vs. cordwainer). In 18th-century London, upholders frequently served as interior decorators responsible for all aspects of a room's decor.[3] These individuals were members of the Worshipful Company of Upholders, whose traditional role, prior to the 18th century, was to provide upholstery and textiles and the fittings for funerals. In the great London furniture-making partnerships of the 18th century, a cabinet-maker usually paired with an upholder: Vile and Cobb, Ince and Mayhew, Chippendale and Rannie or Haig. In the USA, Grand Rapids, Michigan is a center for furniture manufacture along with Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire (England) and many of the best upholsterers can still be found there. These craftsmen continue to create or recreate many antique and modern pieces of furniture.
Furniture reupholstery continues to thrive in the UK with several businesses small and large providing these services. Traditional upholstery is a craft which evolved over centuries for padding and covering chairs, seats and sofas, before the development of sewing machines synthetic fabrics and plastic foam. Using a solid wood or webbed platform, it can involve the use of springs, lashings, stuffings of animal hair, grasses and coir, wools, hessians, scrims, bridle ties, stuffing ties, blind stitching, top stitching, flocks and wadding all built up by hand. A stripped chair ready to be upholstered. In the Middle Ages, domestic interiors were becoming more comfortable and upholstery was playing an important part in interior decoration. The decorations consisted mainly of what we would now consider as "soft furnishings", though there were simple platforms of webbing, canvas or leather for stools, chairs and elaborately decorated coverings that already demonstrated the rudimentary beginnings of upholstered furniture.
By the beginning of the 17th century chair seats were being padded, but this form of upholstery was still fairly basic. All sorts of stuffings from sawdust, grass, feathers, to deer, goat or horsehair were used, although in England the Livery Company forbade the use of goat and deer hair and imposed fines for misdemeanors. The stuffing was heaped on a wooden platform and held in place with a decorative top fabric and nails. This produced a simple dome shape sloping towards the seat. Only towards the end of the 17th century did upholsterers start to develop the techniques that would distribute and shape the stuffing into more controlled shapes. Curled horsehair was being used more consistently for stuffing that was easier to hold in place with stitches in twine that were developed from saddlery techniques. Thus layers of stuffing could be distributed evenly and secured to stay in place. On a basic level, squab cushions were made more stable by using tufting ties. Stuffed edge rolls appeared on seat fronts providing support for cushions to be retained and later for deeper stuffing to be held in place under a fixed top cover.
What we now think of as "classic" upholstery shapes and techniques flourished in the 18th century. Frames of elegant line and proportion were sympathetically matched by expertly executed upholstery. By now, the upholsterers' technical knowledge meant that stuffing's could be controlled along upright and sloping lines, giving new levels of comfort and a simply stated elegance. Later in the century, the border was replaced by a single piece of linen or scrim taken over the stuffed seat and tacked to the frame. At the same time the locked blind stitch and top-stitching combination (pulling the side and top surfaces together and bringing the stuffing up to make a firm top edge) had evolved. In the Victorian era, fashions of opulence and comfort gave rise to excesses of stuffing and padding. Mass production techniques made upholstered furniture available in large quantity to all sections of society. The availability of better-quality steel springs and the development of lashing techniques enabled upholstery to be built up on seats, backs and arms quite independently of the frame shape.
Stuffings became even more complex, edges became elaborately shaped into rolls and scrolls and fabrics were folded into soft padded shapes by means of buttoning. A typical leather-upholstered car seat. An automotive upholsterer, also known as a trimmer, coach trimmer or motor trimmer, shares many of the skills required in upholstery, in addition to being able to work with carpet. The term coach trimmer derives from the days when car frames were produced by manufacturers and delivered to coach builders to add a car body and interior trimmings. Trimmers would produce soft furnishings, carpets, soft tops, and roof linings often to order to customer specifications. Later, trim shops were often an in-house part of the production line as the production process was broken down into smaller parts manageable by semi-skilled labor. Many automotive trimmers now work either in automotive design or with aftermarket trim shops carrying out repairs, restorations or conversions for customers directly.
A few high-quality motor car manufacturers still employ trimmers, for example, Aston Martin. This is the type of upholstery work offered to businesses. Examples would be restaurant seating consisting of booth seats, dining room chairs, bar stools, etc. Also churches, including but not limited to pews and chairs for the congregation, hospitals and clinics consisting of medical tables, chiropractic tables, dental chairs, etc. Also common to this type of upholstery would be lobby and waiting-area seating. Upholstered walls are found in some retail premises. Marine upholstery differs in that one has to consider dampness, sunlight and hard usage. A vinyl or material that is UV and cold-cracking resistant is the choice. Stainless-steel hardware such as staples, screws must be used for a quality job that will last. Any wood used must be of marine quality. Usually a high-resiliency, high-density plastic foam with a thin film of plastic over it is used to keep out water that might get by the seams.