White Barn Upholstery

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White Barn Upholstery

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Your local upholstery service. Thornbury, South Gloucestershire, UK.

Whether you have an antique heirloom you want to restore or your current furniture needs a facelift, click on my website to get a free estimate.

24/10/2026

Six dining chair seat pads given a new lease of life.

Fabric is from

22/10/2026

Well ... this unassuming wingback chair now looks a little different! 😍

This stunning fabric from isn't everyone's cup of tea - you either love it or you don't. The important thing is that my clients love it and they now have a statement piece that they can be proud of.

I'm an upholsterer based in Thornbury, South Gloucestershire. I love transforming furniture and giving pieces a new lease of life. This video shows a wingback armchair being transformed from a drag brown fabric to a vibrant multicoloured velvet.

21/10/2026

I'm working on a wingback chair, changing the fabric from a brown/grey to a multicoloured velvet with a black background. The old mahogany coloured legs really didn't go with the new fabric, so, with my customer's permission, I've painted the legs black. Ooooh.....I think they look fabulous! 😍

19/10/2026

Next on my workbench.... This classic wing back arm chair. My customer has chosen a fabulous velvet from .... It's going to be quite a transformation!

16/10/2026

After stripping this gorgeous 1920s bench, I sent it off to EJ Southall for some frame repairs and finishing before reupholstering it. I used a sheet of rubberised horse hair and a layer of wool as the padding before covering it in gorgeous wool fabric from and trim from

Now it's back in my customers' hallway and they use it every day to put their shoes on. I love it when my work looks good but I love it even more when it gets used!

13/10/2026

The big reveal! Starting with a wooden frame and no information about how the chair was originally upholstered, I let the frame tell me what it wanted to look like. I used traditional techniques to build it up, starting with horse hair on the back. Then springs and coconut coir on the seat. Everything is hand stitched into place to create this stunning little tub chair. The fabric is the customer's own crushed velvet, which, I have to be honest, was not my favourite..... but it grew on me and certainly brings a touch of glamour to this little chair! I'm proud of it and the customer is delighted.

10/10/2026

When I'm stitching an edge onto a chair seat, I feel like a sculptor. This is the fourth row of stitches - the other three rows are blind stitches that give the height to the seat pad. Here I am creating the firm edge over which I can pull the fabric. This edge was particularly challenging because it was a perfectly circular shape. Chairs often have curves on the front, but this chair is perfectly circular. Just gorgeous!

08/10/2026

Next on the workbench is this adorable chair. It was brought to me as a bare frame with no memory of what the chair looked like before. So I'm letting the frame tell me what it wants. And it wants buttons..... Lots of buttons!

I am an upholsterer based in Thornbury, South Gloucestershire. The video shows me using traditional upholstery techniques to restore a tub chair. I'm using horsehair on the back of the chair and deep buttoning. This is a heritage craft that hasn't changed for hundreds of years.

01/10/2026

You never know what you're going to find when you start stripping a chair! 🐁🤣

I am an upholsterer based in Thornbury, South Gloucestershire. I restore chairs and other furniture to give it a new lease of life.

29/09/2026

One of the reasons I changed career from being a journalist to being an upholsterer is that AI can't do my job. But I can use it as a tool to help me do my job. When I was given free rein with this chair I could picture it in my mind how I wanted it to look but I wanted to be able to show the client. I tried drawing something but that just didn't cut it! So I gave instructions to four AI agents with varying degrees of success as you can see by the video.

AI cannot, and should not, function by itself. It needs human input and human decisions made about the output. AI will never upholster a chair in real life, but it can be used to visualise what a chair might look like. It needs precise instructions and it needs a human eye to decide if the output is correct.

For example, while ChatGPT did a good job, I used my knowledge to know that an odd number of flutes is better for this chair and that the seat corners that ChatGPT created were unrealistic in real life! I also had to re-tie in all the springs, add padding to the seat and decide which stuffing to use for the flutes. So still a lot of upholstery knowledge needed!

I will never use AI to create content for my social media. All my images are of my work, unless they are clearly labelled as having been produced by an AI agent.

Address

Thornbury

Website

https://www.whitebarnupholstery.co.uk/

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