Repair & Restoration
We offer a range of repair and restoration services, from full restoration to as-new condition, sympathetic repairs to restore functionality but retain the patina and character of age, or simple functional repairs just to get something back up and running for daily use.
No job is too big or too small. We’ve repaired items as small as watch straps, belts, purses; right up to large antique furniture and vintage car seats and interiors. If you’d like a quotation for your repair, please click and fill out the form below. Or read on for more details.
Repairability and longevity are a sorely missing design feature in many modern products.
The beauty and desirability of old and vintage items is that they were often made by a master of their craft, intended to last a lifetime or more.
But accidents happen, and time and wear-and-tear can take their toll on even the most cherished of items.
At HET, we love nothing more than applying the same traditional skills used to originally make an item to restore it to it’s former glory. Read on for what we can do to help with your beloved items.
How we can help.
Full Restoration
We can bring items back to as close to new as possible. This can include replacement of damaged, or reconditioning of aged and worn hardware; full repair, or replacement where necessary, of damaged leather panels; full reconditioning of leather to get it gleaming to showroom standards.
Sympathetic Restoration
Sometimes patina and age add character that you don’t want to lose. In these cases, we can repair damaged panels and do a custom colour-patching to replicate the patina to the rest of the piece. This is an artisan skill, and at HET this can be done so that you won’t tell a repair has even been made.
Functional Fixes
Perhaps it’s an item that gets heavy use, so the look isn’t as important as the functionality. Or like with a sympathetic restoration, you just don’t want to lose the patina and beauty age has given your item. We can perform just the most necessary repairs to get the item back into full-functioning use, but without the frills of a full restoration or colour-patching. This is the way to display the scars with pride!
The choice is entirely yours.
Case Study - Antique French Armchairs
Sacré Bleu!
HET were commissioned to restore two glorious antique French leather armchairs that were beloved family heirlooms, but had become significantly damaged after spending time in storage.
Sympathetic Restoration
In a full restoration, to as-new condition, repairing damage like this would be a case of replacing the leather panels of the arms completely.
In this case, however, the family were keen to retain all of the original surviving leather, and just wanted to repair the arms of the chairs back to functional, leaving the scars on the other parts where the the structure or integrity of the chairs’ function wasn’t compromised.
In this way, they opted for a sympathetic restoration approach, and could retain the original leather within the piece, but the joins would be hidden so that the end result disguised that a repair was ever necessary.
Piece by Piece.
The padding inside these antique chairs was horse hair, so a local stable provided the extra horsehair needed to re-pad them.
Where leather was missing entirely, replacement pieces, matching the age and colour as closely as possible, are inserted into the gaps. The edges are skived to provide a bonding surface, and are bonded to the underside of the surviving pieces of original leather.
To hide the joins, a filler substance was used that utilises a polyurethane base for structure and longevity, but mixed with real leather fibres to provide flexibility and a look that is as close to the original as possible.
An Artist’s Touch.
Next was the colour-pacthing to blend the colour of the arm repairs to match the surviving leather of the rest of the piece. This is effectively an artist painting on a leather canvas, with skill and intuition used to blend new into old.
All that was needed after this was performing a complete conditioning to the whole of both armchairs. Scars are worn proudly, but the leather is given a ‘feed’ to help it weather the storm of countless extra bums-on-seats for years and years to come.
et Voila!
