Hospitality Furniture

Antiques make wonderful furniture. You don’t tend to see cookie-cutter types of chairs and sofas when you’re dealing with antiques. The wood is ornate, the fabrics are fanciful, and the textures are touchable. But there’s more than wood and fabric there; there’s history and character, too.

If your antiques are looking, well, old, don’t lose hope. Before you rush out to buy all new bistro area furniture, take a good, hard look at what you’ve got. Is it worth saving? Does it have sentimental or financial value? Even the trickiest piece of furniture can be refurbished without causing harm. A new book from Allen and Ina Marx tells you how. All you need is some advice, some patience, a little tenderness, and a healthy dose of creativity.

The Marx couple brought us ‘Professional Painted Finishes’ in 1991, a book that proved you can restore Asian lacquered surfaces and which convinced thousands of readers to start their own furniture restoration businesses. Their newest offering, titled ‘Furniture Restoration: Step-by-Step Tips and Techniques for Professional Results’, goes farther than that. Aimed at a broader audience, the new book wants to take furniture restoration from the hands of professionals and put it in the hands of the people. It’s also got advanced stuff for those who make a career of restoration.

For example, the book explains how to remove the old veneer from a beloved piece of furniture using a brown paper bag, a household iron, and some gentle patience. It also extols the virtue of using your ingenuity to improvise one-of-a-kind tools that will work for your specific project only. Ina and Allen see furniture restoration as something anyone can do. It’s just a matter of problem-solving, they say.

‘Furniture Restoration’ is available from the Watson-Guptill publisher for about $50, or from Amazon for $31.50.