Uplift: My first restaurant banquette!

Let me begin by saying I live in THE best neighbourhood in Toronto, Leslieville, where business-owners are friends and friends are plentiful! Seriously, if one isn't employed by a local business then one is patronizing it, and in lots of cases it's both. Interconnectedness abounds in this community.

And due to such a connection, I was hired by two local restauranteurs to upholster a banquette for their restaurant Table 17. When Erik Joyal and Johnny Sinopoli opened their second restaurant, Ascari Enoteca, they had installed a banquette along one wall of the dining room, and it was this design that they hired me to mimic for Table 17. Once the wooden box came back from the carpenter and the fabric was purchased, I could begin!

The Ascari banquette

To be truthful, as I was with Erik and Johnny, I had NEVER done anything like this before. But from my experience with the Handlebar booths and studying this pic, I devised a way to get the job done!

Though the actual task of upholstering a wood box with foam sounds simple, I was faced with two huge challenges that added to the scale and complexity of this particular job.

The first being the sheer size of the banquette: it was 9 feet long! I nicknamed the seat "The Beast". I had to do the job on location in the banquet room upstairs as getting these pieces up to my studio would be impossible!

the Beast

On the first day, I affixed 3" foam to the top, 2" foam to the front, stapling it so that the seam was nicely rounded, and padded each end with some 1" foam.

The Beast was now ready to don some clothing, which leads me to my second challenge: the fabric. In a clever move for them, John and Erik had chose a sturdy Sunbrella black, an outdoor fabric designed to weather the storm, (AKA spillage and mess from diners that miss their mouths or servers who miss the table) but for me it was the most difficult unwieldy fabric I have ever had to work with! Honestly, it's so firm it sounds like bristol board when you wiggle it. Pulling it tight and making it smooth was so hard on my fingers I lost some skin in the process! Bandaids saved the day and together we got 'er done.

Ouch!

Ta-da! I beat the seat.

The back was a 2-tiered job, as Johnny requested 1" foam for the top bit and a thicker 2" foam for the lumbar region. It was this act of sectioning a back piece that was unknown to me. First I glued the 1" down and stapled the fabric tightly around the back. The second piece of fabric is applied in conjunction with a cardboard strip that ensures a nice straight line. Once that's been stapled down, the second piece of foam is glued down, the fabric is stapled, and the rest is...up-hilstory?...upholstory? ;)