Covesmore set the standard in upholstery and reupholstery, furniture restoration, and polishing for Parker furniture and other premium brands.
Based in Sydney, but we offer furniture refurbishment services Australia-wide. Here, we are lucky enough to sit down and interview Dan Hurditch the CEO of Covesmore Solutions.
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How did you come to meet Tony Parker / Parker Furniture
Tony has kept an active interest and relationships with his past employees, it is through his interest and love for the industry that he is able to keep these relationships alive and in turn build new ones
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What is it that got Covesmore into furniture restoration?
Covesmore has always done furniture restoration and always will, we love putting new life into an old piece and we love even more so making our clients extremely happy to restore a piece that may have been their mothers or grandmothers.
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What do you bring to upholstery and furniture restoration?
As a company we bring not only a wealth of knowledge through our experienced tradesmen but also a fresh outlook to the industry. With most new items from retail stores being made offshore, we are aiming to help people keep their older furniture instead of tossing it out. In majority of cases, we can make an older item look modern just through changing its fabric or colour. We can also adjust some design elements to give it a new contemporary look.
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What are some of the complexities of furniture restoration
The biggest complexity to furniture restoration is that you never know what you are going to get until you work on it. That is why it is important to have such a wide variety of skills to overcome the obstacles that can be thrown at you. We can be repairing an old veneered table and the more you repair the more the old veneer seems to break, or we can strip a lounge to be redone and there can be broken springs that could not have been seen before.
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Is there a cut off date for when something can be restored?
There is no cut off date for restoration, we work with antique pieces that can be a couple hundred years old, all the way to items that may only be a year or two.
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What is the process of a furniture restoration?
Take a lounge for example, first thing we do is strip it back to the bare frame which involves removing hundreds of staples. Next we prepare the frame for the new fabric which means rewebbing the support systems and replacing the foam on the frame. Next we need to cut and sew the fabric using the old covers as templates usually. Finally we upholster the lounge with its new fabric and fill the cushions. The very last step is to check all the work and deliver it back to the customer.
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How did you learn the art of furniture restoration?
We have a variety of tradesman from qualified upholsterers, qualified cabinetmakers and qualified polishers. We even have some who are qualified across multiple disciplines. We have a first year apprentice and our oldest having worked in the trade for over 50 years
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What does Covesmore do that is unique
What really makes Covesmore unique is our commitment to quality, as a growing business we are continually looking at ways to improve our service and workmanship. We continue to invest in new machines, we also work with Tony Parker to see where we can improve which includes areas such as seat foam construction and the different types of foam. How the foam is applied to help it last longer. We do not take short cuts, for example when a lounge is unpicked, every last staple is removed before we reupholster. There are many more little things like this that we do to make sure we are delivering our best quality all the time.
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What else is in the pipeline for Covesmore?
We have a very exciting few years ahead which will include custom bedheads, a new luxury lounge range plus other new products as we head into manufacturing as a new branch of the business. We also have our sites on starting a school to teach people the art.
