AFTER 18 years of genteel ownership, followed by two years of my toddler's bouncing, my beloved Eames lounge chair looks, well, beyond classic. The black leather's rich patina is marred by countless cracks. The rosewood shell is chipped and streaked with white paint. And the seat cushion's guts spill out indecorously where the stitching has burst from the zipper.Designed in 1956 and made by Herman Miller, the chair, with its accompanying ottoman, was bought new by my father over 30 years ago. I inherited it in 1983. I love this chair, even though the ottoman is always in the way in my modest living room, and the precise edge of its molded plywood shell cut my son's face when he clung to it as he learned to stand.I could have bought a new one, of course, because Herman Miller still makes the chair ($3,685.) But it is not the same. In the new models, down has given way to foam and fiberfill. The Brazilian rosewood -- an endangered species -- has been replaced with walnut or cherry. The leather is now matte and decidedly less lustrous.
In any case, I didn't want to replace my chair. I just wanted it to look as it used to. For $2,376, Herman Miller would reupholster the existing cushions, but I disliked the matte quality of the company's ''official'' leather. I called the Herman Miller New York Design Center to see if it could suggest a local refurbisher who might offer a wider choice of leather, as well as more services. The customer service agent referred me to a place called Prestige. She told me to talk to Sol. This seemed awfully unofficial. Didn't the guy have a last name? So I called Knoll, illustrious maker of furniture by Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer, for a recommendation. To my astonishment, Knoll also suggested Sol. Finally, I asked Evan Snyderman, an owner of R 20th Century in TriBeCa. ''I talk to him twice a day.'' Prestige Furniture & Design Group (718-721-2200) is just off Northern Boulevard in Woodside, Queens, in a neighborhood of car dealerships and attached brick houses. Its one-room workshop is open to the street through a roll-up garage door.
Dozens of wooden chair frames dangle from the ceiling above reams of fabric, leather and foam. There are ladders, toolboxes, electric saws, industrial sewing machines and cookie tins overflowing with nuts, bolts and washers.Here and there amid the jumble, like celebrities glimpsed through a crowd, stand icons of classic modernist furniture in states of undress: a George Nelson Coconut chair, foam innards exposed through a gash in its red fabric; a Florence Knoll sofa, seat newly appareled, back still bare; the naked legless shells of a Womb chair and an Arne Jacobsen Swan chair nestled together on the floor; a pair of Mies Barcelona chairs, resplendent in deep burgundy leather; and, oddly, an analyst's couch.Sol Ovadia, an affable former accountant from Long Island, showed me around, stopping to point out particular pieces. He discovered the furniture business while doing the books for Imperial, a firm that made psychotherapist couches. Mr. Ovadia opened Prestige as a custom upholstery shop in 1986, producing the analyst couches when Imperial's two partners retired.
The couches -- available in nine styles -- still make up 10 percent of his output. He happened to redo a Knoll piece for a client, and word got back to the company that he was someone it could reliably recommend. Now, 50 percent of his business is classic modernist pieces. It is a strictly professional relationship. His home has ''none of this,'' he said. ''It's all down and feather cushions in soft colors.''''There is a feel to the period,'' Mr. Ovadia added. ''It's very hard to reproduce a 50's or 60's piece without knowing what it's supposed to look like.''Norman McCrary, a New York-based interior designer, agrees. Mies Brno chairs that clients of his had owned for decades were overstuffed by an upholstery shop he had used for traditional furniture.''Traditional furniture tends to have a crown to it,'' Mr. McCrary said. ''This particular chair is supposed to retain its same shape, clean and smart, all the way through.'' ''They were able to capture the crisp lines,'' he said.Mr. Ovadia's 11 upholsterers carefully disassemble every unfamiliar piece, noting the sewing method, the hardware system and the shape of foam stuffing, which they always replace with new material because foam eventually disintegrates.
''There are no shortcuts,'' Mr. Ovadia said. ''It comes back to bite you.'' He also relies on his collection of Knoll catalogs dating from the 60's.Although Herman Miller does not officially endorse independent restorers, its New York showroom and W. B. Wood, its New York dealer, send customers to Mr. Ovadia, and Knoll recommends him directly. He repays the favor by recommending shops that do work he does not do, like metalwork and replating. ''It's easy to say, I don't do that, goodbye,'' Mr. Ovadia said. ''But you feel like you're part of a team.'' He chooses his upholsterers carefully. ''You have to have good hands, and you have to appreciate the piece of furniture you are working on,'' Mr. Ovadia said. ''But more than anything else, it's intellect. In some shops you can get away with a few knockers. In this shop, I can't.''I could see the workmanship all around me. But what about my Eames? The thought of stripping my chair made me nervous. Couldn't we just fix the zipper?''Leather has a life span of about 30 years,'' Mr. Ovadia said.
''When leather gets real old, it starts ripping as you work on it.'' He offered me three leathers, from very shiny to matte. None looked like my chair's leather. The shiny one was too garish, the middle one too matte. He told me I would be happiest with the middle one, and with wear and oiling, it will gain more luster.He would retain the down in my cushions but wrap it with foam to fill it out a bit. He would sand the rosewood, clean it with naphtha and then oil it, but would not fill the cracks with veneer because it would never match. Instead, he would apply a little stain to disguise the cracks a bit. His estimate was $995.Still undecided, I asked Christopher Wilk, a furniture curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, whether new leather would fundamentally alter my chair. ''There's nothing like the real thing,'' he said. ''If you are a museum or collector or design aficionado, any kind of alteration, refurbishment or replacement of material diminishes the value of the chair in terms of its authenticity and its closeness to what it was originally.
But if you're going to use it, you have to make compromises.''I was getting close to driving my chair out to Woodside when I heard a dissenting opinion from Olaf Unsoeld, an owner of Fine Wood Conservation (718-802-1659) in Brooklyn, which restores furniture for museums and collectors. He warned me against letting anyone sand my chair. ''The rosewood veneer is very thin, and you can sand it until it's gone,'' he said. ''Sanding also takes off the age and patina. Then you might as well buy yourself a new piece.''Alternatively, his firm might scrape the paint patches off with a surgeon's scalpel or find a solvent that does not affect the wood. It would replace missing pieces of veneer, matching them carefully, and glue the parts in danger of splintering. Then it might apply an oil similar to the original or perhaps a wax, which is removable. Mr. Unsoeld also suggested I retain the original leather, if at all possible.At $100 an hour, the restoration cost could exceed the chair's market value -- $3,000 to $4,000, or it might cost only a few hundred dollars, depending on the intervention.