How to choose leather furniture
MEET THE MATERIAL.
Leather furniture – Famous for its buttery feel, amazing durability, easy maintenance, and sticking to your legs in the summer, it’s no wonder leather is one of the most popular upholstery options for furniture.
With so many great options it can be a tough choice deciding what is the best for you.
Luckily, we’ve got every grain, texture, and color you can possibly think of (and some you can’t). All beautiful, but all different. To determine what furniture is right for your home, lifestyle, and taste, this is a comprehensive guide that gets up close and personal with one of our favorite materials.
LET’S START FROM THE START: WHAT’S LEATHER?
Leather is made from the cured hides of cattle. Tanning practices vary around the world, but we only work with the best — which is why our hides are tanned and finished in Italy.
As a natural material, leather will often have wrinkles, scars, creases, and color variations. We find that these represent leather’s unique character and appeal — but we also offer options for those who don’t feel the same.
WHY REAL LEATHER?
We are endlessly inspired by nature and the adventures that await us in it. You can tell by the names we give our products and the materials we make them with. Authenticity is important to us as we strive to make the world a more comfortable and beautiful place. As a result, we believe in using real, natural materials that we carefully select to build an article that will deliver remarkable furniture experiences.
COOL. SO WHAT ABOUT YOUR LEATHER?
There’s a lot of confusion about different types of leather. What does aniline mean? Leather has a grain?And what it all means for your life. What will my toddler not destroy once nap-time is over? What if I want a really distressed look?.
Don’t worry, we’ve got all the information you need.
GRAIN.
And we don’t mean barley or rice. We’re talking about the layers of the hide in our articles.
A full-grain hide is the top layer of a hide that contains all the beautiful, natural variations in tone that real leather is known for. It has unique markings as individual as fingerprints. This includes insect marks, wrinkles, spots, and stretch marks that were developed over the course of that animal’s life. Through age and use, this leather will develop a stunning, warm sheen known as patina. It’s what gives a sofa that comforting, vintage look everyone is after.
Top-grain hides, by contrast, go through a sanding process that buffs out all those natural variations to create a leather that is less varied, but is strong and durable.
ANILINE.
Aniline simply refers to the dying process a hide goes through once it has been tanned. We feature two different types of aniline in our collection: full-aniline and semi-aniline.
A full-aniline hide has been carefully dyed so that it retains all the beautiful, natural markings and color variation that is inherent in the hide. Remember the full-grain leather we were talking about before? Full-grain and full-aniline are mutually exclusive terms — a fancy way of saying that you can’t have one without the other. Anytime you see one of these two terms, just know it means all the touchable goodness of a leather hide with all the color variation that goes with it.
Conversely, a semi-aniline hide has a thin layer of wax applied just before the dying process. This is done to make the color more uniformly absorbed. Remember when we talked about top-grain? Top-grain and semi-aniline go hand in hand. Together, they produce a leather that is more consistent and hardy.
Still wondering what we are talking about? Visit us at the store or call us on 09 440 9858
Leave a Reply