Upholstery showing its harder side
Exposed wood adds flair to transitional designs
By Gary Evans and Joan Gunin -- Furniture Today, 11/10/2008 12:00:00 AM
HIGH POINT — Upholstery showed a lot of wood at the recent High Point Market.
Buyers saw wood everywhere, especially exposed wood used as an outline around transitional upholstery styles. This treatment provides an interesting sort of a picture frame for an otherwise straightforward, sometimes plain-looking chair or sofa.
While wood was more noticeable on transitional silhouettes, it also was used on a number of other looks, ranging from a wrap-around on a elegant, slightly formal sofa featured in the window of the Westgate showroom to the scrolled top on an white country French piece at Highland House.
Show wood on upholstery has been around for awhile, and may have hit its peak a few years back when manufacturers found they could use the cheap labor of Asia to develop hand-carved wood details, adding value to lines at a wide range of price points.
But this season's application is more subtle, and probably wouldn't be of great notice if there wasn't so much of it, especially in the transitional lines that have, until now, been basically woodless. Since transitional is by nature clean, usually with a plain or muted body cloth and ornamentation limited to the punched up color of pillows, where were manufacturers to turn for something different?
Wood, of course.
Younger Furniture, moving aggressively into the transitional arena this market, took that road with several new models that it showed in its space in 220 Elm.
“We developed these styles using exposed wood to create another dimension in our line,” said Meredith Younger Spell, a company official. “Mixing exposed wood with clean lines results in a retro style that is very interesting to us. It gives the pieces another angle.”
John Charles Designs for American Leather, which has used wood as a design element for several years, featured wood this market on the base and legs of a fabric banquette with tube arms, a chair, an ottoman and other pieces.
Lexington's new Barclay Square Abbot sofa, which combines an embossed leather on the arms and back with fabric on the back and seat cushion, wraps wood around the silhouette — which gives it a great-looking back for floating in a room.
Klaussner, in another look, uses a fretwork design for the arms and back of its Madison Lane sofa and a recessed bit of carpentry work for the apron.
Rick Hendrix, director of domestic upholstery merchandising, said the upholstery, with the sofa retailing at about $1,399, complements a case goods group in Klaussner's line.
“Part of it is that the customer is looking for something different — something that is not the norm,” Hendrix said. “A lot of work — a lot of man-hours — went into it.”
