Big sofa, tiny hall? He’ll cut a deal

‘I can’t watch,” said Andrew Clarke, shutting his eyes.

“You shouldn’t,” the doctor said calmly.

The doctor’s assistant pulled out an electric saw. He started slicing. The ground was already strewn with staples that had been yanked out. After one, two, three . . . seven incisions, Clarke’s $4,000, perfectly worn-in, brown leather couch lay in pieces with the 88-inch-long back surgically separated from the arms and bottom. Clarke’s cherished couch looked like a dissected moose.

“Gosh,” he mumbled, his eyes wide, “whatever it takes.”

Sal Giangrande calls himself the New York Couch Doctor, but in fact he’s New York’s Doctor Whatever It Takes for desperate people like Clarke, who couldn’t shimmy his old couch into his new apartment and wasn’t willing to give up either one.

The young real estate executive was moving from one apartment to another in the same brick building in the heart of west Greenwich Village. The new place was bigger and had a spectacular view of the Hudson River but was situated in the middle of a narrow hallway.

“The movers tried several times, several angles, but they couldn’t get the couch around the turn from the hallway into the new place,” Clarke said. He was ready to dump it when his doorman told him about the Couch Doctor -- aka Sal Giangrande.

“This is New York, where people want what they want when they want it,” Giangrande said. “I spend all day giving them what they want.”

Sometimes that means peeling the white leather off two oversized parts of an imported sectional worth $30,000, slicing them apart, reassembling them with 36 metal brackets -- and then getting shouted at by the unsatisfied owner because, she insisted, “it still looks bumpy.”

Sometimes that means fielding calls within minutes from hysterical clients who live on opposite sides of Manhattan and both want him to come over right away. One is splayed on her couch in the basement of her new apartment building, while the other is plopped on her new sofa bed that the movers left on the sidewalk in front of her brownstone.

“I get calls all day long,” said Giangrande, who wears his phone headset during dinner with the family and sometimes even to bed. “It never stops.”

This is all part of life in America’s vertical capital. In a city of pre-World War II apartments with narrow doorways, modern high-rises with low ceilings, and elevators so small they belong in Old Europe, the Couch Doctor is vital.

Maneuvering furniture in and out of New York apartments has always been tricky. But in the age of the super-sized couch, this has become even trickier.

Just 15 years ago the maximum length of a typical couch was 84 inches and the width 34 inches, or thereabouts. But as Americans fell in love with McMansions and grew in girth, the demand for bigger and cushier couches expanded.

Furniture stores began offering couches as long as 120 inches and as deep as 43 inches -- and the number of doctors of disassembling them grew too. Sofa dismantling became a necessary service in new and old American cities, and even in suburban homes with spiraling staircases and converted basements.

In New York this is a thriving, perhaps recession-proof business that has attracted energetic entrepreneurs like the Couch Doctor who compete for business by thrusting their business cards at doormen and convincing chain furniture stores like Crate and Barrel and Restoration Hardware to use them exclusively.

The Couch Doctor’s competition includes Dr. Sofa, “the furniture surgeon”; Z Bros. (the owner’s grandfather used to build sofas); and Unique Furniture Service, another small operation that switched to hand saws after customers complained that the buzzing of electric saws scared them.

“I don’t think furniture was ever small enough to fit through the typical 28-inch New York doorway,” said Maria Thompson, manager of the flagship Mitchell Gold Bob Williams furniture store in SoHo. “But a 100-inch sofa? We have customers who want them but can’t begin to fit them through their front doors.”

That’s why Thompson makes referrals, so to speak, to the Couch Doctor. Before any sale is final, the company sends an employee to assess whether an overstuffed couch can squeeze around all the corners.

If the answer is no, the company either recommends another couch or suggests a house call from the Couch Doctor. Many New York furniture stores don’t make referrals -- and they end up with clients who get crazy when the sofa doesn’t fit and demand a refund. Typically, customers only get back half their money.

“No company wants a lot of returned stock,” Giangrande said, “so they send customers to us and hope it all works out.”

He charges about $400 for an easy case, and repeat customers get a discount. He and his crew of four dismantle three to four couches a day on a good week. Their biggest challenge was taking apart a custom-made 144-inch couch and putting it back together.

“Now that was something,” the doc said.

Giangrande, 37, started in the furniture business delivering couches for Castro Convertible. He noticed that the late Bernard Castro got around corners by inventing sleepers that could be taken apart with just a wrench. Giangrande ultimately learned the fine art of knocking down about any variety of couch and started his own business four years ago.

Giangrande can tell you anything you want to know about the guts of a couch. His general philosophy goes something like this: “You get what you pay for.”

“When you buy something for $399, you get pressed wood that’s pretty junky,” he said.

On the other hand, he has a favorite store in Lower Manhattan that imports couches from Italy made of fine leather and solid wood, and when he opens up something like that -- wow, it’s a thing to behold.

Born and raised in Long Island, Giangrande still lives in the same neighborhood with his wife, Holly, and their twin toddlers; he runs the business out of his home, but also traverses New York City making house calls in a white truck emblazoned with a drawing of a little man wearing a stethoscope, tool belt and a mirror on his head and spinning a couch on one finger.

Giangrande is obsessed with his cases and talks about them constantly at home. “It’s very annoying,” Holly protested, in her Long Island twang. “We’ll have plans to go somewhere, and then he gets an emergency call and I get dropped like a hot potato.”

Giangrande, who has the build of a bouncer and the work ethic of a heart surgeon, said, “It’s very exciting -- you have to make a call whether a job can be done, and it’s not always clear.”

Like in the case of the $30,000 white leather sectional. Giangrande’s crew did an initial assessment and decided the two 90-inch-long pieces of the sectional couldn’t be easily taken apart -- and they didn’t want to risk ruining something so expensive.

At 9 that night, Giangrande drove from Long Island to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to take a look for himself. “There were complications,” he conceded. “There weren’t the usual seams, and it had buttons pressed into the leather. That’s why my guys got intimidated. That’s where I came in.”

The next morning Giangrande returned with his crew, and within 90 minutes the couches were cut into pieces and swaddled in blankets like newborns. The problem had been a 7-foot-high hallway ceiling; but those babies slid easily out of the elevator and into the living room.

Just as the customer was coming home -- she hadn’t wanted to see the butchering and had gone to get her hair done -- Giangrande hustled to remove a handprint left on the white leather.

Still, the customer wasn’t satisfied when the crew left -- and at one point even canceled the $1,500 check she had paid him. But Giangrande went back several times and meticulously re-pulled the white leather and smoothed out the bumps until finally she was happy. And so was he.

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geraldine.baum@latimes.com