Older furniture just has better quality than new. It’s made from better materials. It’s constructed better. It often looks better longer, too. Refreshing your home furnishings with well-chosen new additions, fabrics and finishes updates your home beautifully, giving it meaning and creating a highly personalized look.
Why Refreshing Your Furnishings Matters
Unlike your older pieces, many big box store furnishings share a somewhat uniform, mass-produced look that can feel less personal. Yes, your older pieces might be outdated. They might even be a little dingy. But rather than replacing them with newer furnishings, consider updating and preserving them.
New furniture from today’s big box stores stays in style for about 10 to 12 years. They often appear worn before their time. Your older, well-made pieces will last considerably longer, looking good for as many as 25 years.
Your older pieces often carry sentimentality. They might be heirlooms, or pieces you purchased with a beloved partner. All the more reason to seriously consider refurbishment over replacement.
Updating with Fabrics for Style and Cohesion
Nothing pulls together mismatched furniture like fabrics. Recovering your well-made sofas and chairs gives you an instant “high-end” look. It’s a customization element that can’t be beat.
What you need to understand about sofas and chairs purchased in the last 10 to 15 years is that the materials and workmanship have grown progressively cheaper. Fabrics are one of the first places big box stores cut back on quality. Cushions are another.
Better quality fabrics are designed to look better, have a better ‘hand’ or ‘feel’ to them. Stay in style longer. And thus, they are easier to choose simply because you don’t have to weed through a lot of cheaper, poorly designed materials.
Recovering your sofas, armchairs and ottomans with upgraded fabric is a great investment and a great way to refresh your living spaces.
The Cost of Recovering
You’ll notice that the cost of recovering isn’t a huge difference from buying new. But the appearance and ‘feel’ is a world of difference.
Perhaps the best feature of recovering your older sofas and armchairs is how well customizing with fabrics pulls together your mismatched pieces into a living space that’s truly lovely. Most 90-inch sofas require around 24 yards and 35-inch armchairs around 10. Labor is usually around $1500 for a sofa and $900 for an armchair.
The cost of good quality upholstery fabric is over $100 a yard. In my online home design program, I share my best online and showroom resources for fabrics.
Refresh Your Furniture with Decorative Paints and Finishes
Decorative paints and beautiful stains are not quite as dramatic at updating the pieces you have, but they’re a close second. They update your older wood pieces with one of the easiest tools in a designer’s box: the use of color.
I often say color is a lazy designer’s way to work, but when it comes to decorative finishes, the results are amazing. Choosing decorative paint colors, techniques and stains does require some know-how, but you can train your eye to understand how things will look—and you can learn how to choose colors well.
It’s also a great idea to have some favorite colors you are familiar with and can fall back on.
When choosing wood stains and decorative paint colors, don’t try to match your pieces. It always ends up looking too studied. Coordinating stains rather than matching them looks better. I like coordinating my fabrics with new decorative paint colors for my wood pieces and then mixing them alongside the stained wood pieces for a mix of woods and paints.
Pulling Fabrics and Finishes Together for a Cohesive Look
Beautiful fabrics and finishes, a few well-chosen pieces of furniture, and a better furniture layout—these have always been my preferred way to design meaningful, unstudied spaces. They pull together mismatched furnishings. and stay fresh looking for 25 years or longer.
They preserve better quality rather than replacing it with lesser-quality pieces. There is less waste as working with what you have is conservative in nature. And they just have a really beautiful, evolved look.
By focusing on fabrics and finishes you can refresh your home without replacing everything in one place and time.
Next Step: Discover the 5-Step Home Makeover Framework
Your next step to refresh your home with what you have. Learn to place and pair your furniture and accessories beautifully and functionally and make better choices on your next purchases. Get this free download and get started this weekend. The 5-Step Home Makeover Framework
What is Wellness Design? Learn more about the connection between your wellbeing and your home, featured on Deirdre Fitzpatrick’s Dying to Ask Podcast. And if you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, check out my blog post, “Hiring an Interior Designer”.
