This is chair number three for Chanda and Jamie. This chair had seen better days and a few unfortunate repairs. The legs were nearly completely shot and a few new holes had been attempted to secure them. The pesky thing about these chairs is that the legs and the body are made of two different materials. In this case, maple and walnut… Both stained/finished to coordinate — The two dissimilar woods will never truly match. A few original features were kept including the light staining around the edges. These chairs as original did not embrace the multi-ply look like the Eames chair‘s did but instead used stain and edge treatments to obscure it a bit.
Because of the excessive wear, the chair could never be completely restored per original, but instead it was rebuilt using slightly more modern materials that took up the slack and will stand the test of time.
[After stripping, the chair lost some of the original stain details like this charcoal-toned edge that I needed to add back.]
After
I will say that the new hardware on the bottom, while not that attractive, holds fairly well. The four outside bolts are original (replaced, but original locations) and the two inside ones have been added later because the outside ones aren’t terribly secure. Since it’s on the bottom, it won’t be seen. We may add brass hardware there, but it’s an unnecessary expense for something as underside functional as hold-down hardware.
[The old lap-joint 2-piece base had worn so much that it was no longer stable. We has to permanently glue and fill the interlocking pieces for stability which worked well in this case. Again, sometimes repair is not "restoration" when there's nothing left to restore. In this case, year of wobbling damaged the chair to the point where we had to take an alternate path.]
[We may eventually add brass or blackened hardware underneath.]
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