Furniture isn’t just functional. For interior aficionados, this may seem like an obvious point, but in the age of mass-produced Wayfair chairs and easy online shopping, it’s easy to lose sight of furniture’s beauty and quality. People like Jason Leviere of Santom Upholstery & Refinishing are intimately familiar with the artisanship of furniture. For Leviere, furniture isn’t just stuff—it’s what makes up our day-to-day lives. It’s what quite literally supports us! His business, family-owned since 1958, has allowed him to see how modernity and the past meet happily through restoring old furniture.
For Santom Upholstery, Furniture is More Than Things
Leviere grew up around furniture, with his parents often pointing out the condition of the pieces in restaurants, bars, and funeral homes the family went to. His father would come home from work, eat dinner with the family, and then retreat to his workshop to tinker with the chairs and couches that came home with him. “I remember thinking ‘Wait, didn’t he just come from home from work?’” Leviere said.
Though he loved watching his parents restore furniture, he wanted to move away from upholstery, which was “as much of [his] daily life as eating cereal” and forge his own path. So, he went to New York and worked on the corporate side of the furniture business for Crate & Barrel, Jonathan Adler, and Restoration Hardware. But when his parents retired, he felt a calling to return to hands-on work and hasn’t looked back since.
Every Piece is Different
“Every single piece of furniture is different,” Leviere explained. “You could look at 400 wing-chairs and every single one of them would be different.” What also changes over time is how people relate to their homes. One of the biggest mistakes Leviere sees clients make when shopping is buying only based on aesthetics, not for their lifestyle. Sure, a Mario Bellini cream sofa might be beautiful, but if you live in a house with kids and dogs, you’re going to be spending a lot of money down the line to keep it in mint condition…or even decent shape!
While there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a consideration worth making. “Nowadays, we live in our houses,” Leviere said. “My grandparents’ generation had a formal room for entertaining that they only used at Christmastime. Now, people spend a lot more time in their home using things every day.”
And the way in which we live in our homes is also very different, Leviere explained. “People are feeling like they don’t have much control in the world, so they can control the inside of their home,” he said. But he also encounters plenty of vintage furniture from other eras, when people related to objects differently. He once saw a set of chairs washed away in the Johnstown Flood, which had been refurbished by hand by the original owners. “The springs that were inside were tied with telephone cord, because that’s all that the people had access to. The seat was stuffed with army blankets. Whatever they had, they would use.”
Santom Upholstery’s Work Around Pittsburgh
But not everything Leviere and his team restore is as dramatically storied as decrepit chairs from the Johnstown Flood. Sometimes, he works on projects for larger institutions that Pittsburghers get to see every day. “We were lucky enough to help with the nationality rooms at Pitt,” he explained. These rooms underwent renovations, but the university only wanted conservation, not a full makeover.
Pittsburgh is full of architectural treats for the eyes, both inside and outside. One place Leviere recommended to go to really see what furniture restoration can be is the Priory Hotel on the North Side. “There are some hotels that the lobby looks like a Vanderbilt-era lobby, then you go up to your room and it looks like a Best Western. The Priory isn’t like that,” he said. He recommended a “staycation” there or a drink at the Monk Bar.
However, you don’t have to have an 1890s chair or a full-service hotel to restore to work with a conservator, or even to just develop slightly better habits to care for your furniture. “The things that your mom would yell at you about, I would yell at you about: not using coasters, not watering a plant in the middle of the table, not using a hot plate in the middle of the table, all that stuff,” Leviere said. But, if you have been putting coffee mugs straight on the table, there’s no need to be ashamed. That’s why Santom is around, to spend time and care on the objects others live with. “Reupholstering and refinishing and doing this kind of renovation is custom work. It’s not going to be a drive-thru kind of experience. But if you put in the time, it’s worth it.”
Story by Emma Riva
Photo courtesy of Santom Upholstery
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