A beloved chair’s artful restoration
Heather Hewitt bought the cane-backed Baroque-style armchair more than 50 years ago when she was modeling for the Ford Agency and living with her husband, Simon & Schuster editor Andrew Ettinger, in New York’s Greenwich Village.
For years it traveled with the couple -- from Manhattan to New Jersey and finally to their Lake Hollywood home, just below the Hollywood sign. But the cane eventually ripped, and worms ate away at the chair’s bun-shaped feet.
One day someone leaned back too hard, shattering one side of the carved wood back frame.
“We had a choice to throw it out or follow my heart,” Hewitt says. And so Ettinger began a quest, taking the piece around to furniture repair shops, which said renovation was impossible.
“One guy told me it was too thin,” Ettinger says. “He couldn’t get a nail in. A nail?” Ettinger shakes his head.
Then the couple met Val Stepanenko, a carpenter in Pasadena who specializes in antique furniture repair. He recognized the piece as a William and Mary end chair: a foliated crest atop the back panel, an X-shaped cross stretcher connecting the turned legs, and Flemish-style molded, curved arms that tapered downward, ending in scrolled handholds.
“You could see he knew what he was doing,” Ettinger says, describing the way Stepanenko handled the wood. “Not a mechanic. So many people today might as well work in a garage.”
Stepanenko, the Siberian son of a carpenter, has been rescuing terminal cases from landfills for more than a decade, relying upon his set of clockmaker’s tools for the fine details.
Stepanenko’s first step was to disassemble the chair completely. Though some customers are alarmed by the thought -- they just want the broken piece mended -- Stepanenko believes that one break can be a sign of structural weakness.
To prevent further damage, old glue is removed, joints are cleaned, dowels are inserted for strength, and new adhesive is applied.
For Hewitt and Ettinger’s chair, Stepanenko then used a groove router to carve channels for wood filler and bind the broken back panel. He made new bun-shaped feet and added a finial onto the X-shaped stretcher.
Stepanenko’s wife, a seamstress, made upholstery to replace the cane back and the seat. “I am destroying the original style,” he says. “But they want to use this chair -- not just for decoration.”
Hewitt and Ettinger weren’t concerned about historical accuracy.
“We like what we like,” Ettinger says. “We didn’t buy it as an investment and I’m not a purist. It made sense to be able to use the chair, and I never did like the cane.”
Once the chair was whole again, Stepanenko cleaned it by hand and mixed color for the new parts. Matching the original finish is as important as the carpentry, he says.
The entire process took a few weeks.
Stepanenko once had a designer client who was transporting a container full of antiques by truck. The vehicle had an accident, and the container tumbled off the road, smashing the 17th century tables, desk and chairs inside. The furniture came to him as bags of fractured wood and had to be reassembled piece by piece, like jigsaw puzzles.
“Many people say they repair furniture, but with nails and wood? That’s not repair furniture. That’s destroy furniture,” he says.
Advice for others: Research each piece to determine its origin and value.
Then decide how you want the piece restored: in a way that celebrates its key features but may depart from the original design, or authentically, even perhaps keeping some flaws as signs of its age and design integrity.
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