Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Ah, the vagaries of style

In 1951, the A. H. McIntosh & Co Ltd of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, produced their first "modern" furniture. By the late 50s, they were the first company outside Scandinavia to mass produce modern teak furniture.

We were lucky to pick up a beautiful McIntosh dining set recently, but somewhere along the way...probably in the late 1980s or early 1990s, by the looks of it...someone had "updated" the seat upholstery. I"m sure, in its day, it was considered a very pretty polyester blend fabric, although I'm not sure it was ever an appropriate choice for these sleek Swedish-inspired chairs. Now the print just looks big and gaudy and twenty years out-of-style.


We decided to replace it with some very subdued vintage fabric that we found at an estate sale last month. Here are the chairs, returned to a more classic version of themselves. I'll show them to you with the table when we move them to the store.


3 comments:

  1. can it get any more wonderful..probably no!

    awesome set...drool!!

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  2. Hmm. I think I actually kinda like the "as found" upholstery. It has that eclectic cross pollinated style you see alot of on AT. But they look great with the new fabric too.

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  3. I admit to being enough of a purist to want, most of the time anyway, to put things back as close as possible to the way they were when new. I like a little pop of unexpected color though and even a little irony in upholstery occasionally, but I almost always prefer bright, patterned contemporary fabric on something ornate and curvy, like a Queen Anne armchair. I guess I jut love Scandinavian furniture too much to play fast and loose with it...LOL

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