When first you first Northland Upholstery, it isn’t immediately clear if it’s a business, or just the first floor apartment in a subdivided two-story house. Aside from the sign in the window to the left of the door, there’d be no way to distinguish it at all. As you walk up the three or four concrete steps to the front door you’re even tempted to knock. But then you remembered that it really is a business, and the woman who runs it is nothing short of a master at her trade.
When you walk in the door, you’re instantly greeted by clutter. To the right, there are rows and shelves of material samples, buckets of tools, and scraps of foam. To the left, sits a hundred year old settee on homemade wooden sawhorses. The little antique sofa is a work in progress, and is now decked out in brand new blue velvet fabric.
Behind the settee, another old chair is being brought back to life. This one isn’t quite as far along. Lying on its back, the barrel-backed wing-chair is a mess of half sown fabric with yellow foam pouring out of its various parts. Along the left wall, between the windows of the shop, sits a floor to ceiling bare-wood shelf loaded with books of fabric samples.
Paul Simon’s “Bodyguard” quietly pours out of a speaker perched atop the shelving. The 80s and 90s adult contemporary station is a staple of the shop, setting just the mood for her light-hearted creative work.
There is a foot wide path from the front door, between the samples and foam and half dead furniture that leads to the back of the shop. Here you are greeted again. Not by more clutter, or as much clutter, but by a beaming smile from a tired, yet energetic face. It’s Brenda LeClair, and this is her shop.
You can find Brenda here, her hair in long gray and brown ponytail, wearing her royal blue work-shirt, which despite a couple of tears in the sleeves has somehow retained its vibrant color, almost everyday of the week. If the sign in the window says closed, but the lights are on, give it a try.
“Sometimes I forget to flip the sign,” Brenda says with a laugh. “Then it’s like 3 o’clock and I’m like, well there’s no point now!” But that’s Brenda: relaxed, easy going, and super friendly.
The 55 year old Plattsburgh native treats customers like she’s known them her whole life; and some of them she has. As one of her customers, Glen, came into the shop, she immediately gave him her trademark smile and cheerful, “How ya doin’?” To watch Brenda interact with her customers is like watching two lifelong friends catch up. Glen came in to pick up the back to his massage chair.
Brenda had fixed the chair with perfection, and after Glen paid her and left, she began to explain what had happened to his chair.
“He had a really expensive massage chair, and somehow the fabric got caught in the motor and ripped the back out,” she explains. “The company wouldn’t repair it for whatever reason, so I told him if he could bring it in I’d do what I could.” You’d never know it from their interaction, but that was only the second time she’d. “I just met him last week,” she says with a smile. “He seems nice though.”
Maybe it’s that energy that’s kept her in business the last 11 years. But upholstery was never what Brenda planned to do, she just jumped into it. Starting out sewing with dreams of being a fashion designer, she’d hope to one day study in Europe.
“My mom taught me how to sew when I was in the sixth grade. She used to make our clothes and stuff,” Brenda remembers. “Then I started sewing, because I was this skinny little kid,” she laughs. “My sister was the perfect height, and everything looked beautiful on her. Here I am this long legged kid, and for anything to fit me, everything was way too short.”
Brenda will never forget the first thing she made. “The first thing I made was a flannel night gown. I was so proud. It had the little elastic in the cuffs so they flared a little, and it had a little button pocket here,” she says as she gestures with her hands enthusiastically. “It was long with a ruffled bottom so I could adjust the length, and it fit me perfectly. I felt like an angel, so I decided to make another one.” Two flannel nightgowns were all it took to set her on the upholstered path. “I was buying patterns and saving my money from babysitting just to make clothes.”
Brenda’s sewing progressed rapidly and soon she was designing her own outfits. “It got to where I couldn’t just make something from a pattern, I had to change it. I used to do sketches all the time, not that I was a good sketcher, but it was like I’d get an idea in my head and I’d have to draw a picture just so I could remember what it was,” she remembers. “If my family would have had the money I would have wanted to go to school over in France or Europe and become a designer.”
It seems that Brenda’s life has been defined by a tendency to jump into things, and her start in upholstery is no exception. An old friend, Agnes Kennedy, had asked her to redo some chairs for her son’s wedding gift. The two had met when Brenda sewed a massive set of wall to wall drapes for a room in Agnes’s house and grew to be close friends.
“Agnes asked me if I’d ever done any upholstery. I said no, I don’t know how,” Brenda remembers. “She said ‘I’m sure you can do it, just do the best you can, they don’t have to be perfect.’ I was unemployed at the time so I was like, ok,” she says with a nervous sigh, capped by a smile.
Little did Brenda know Agnes’s request would catapult her into her future career. “This was my very beginning. I went to the library and got three upholstery books. Then I took a notebook and started undoing the fabric from the last piece put on to the very beginning,” she explains. “I wrote everything down that I took off so that when I put it back together I had to do the reverse. It turned out that I had two of the hardest pieces you can do and didn’t know it at the time. This is how I’ve jumped into everything.”
To add to the difficulty of the chairs, Brenda had chosen to upholster the chair in a gray and white “flame-stitch pattern”. Any sort of pattern like that needs to have all of the parts line up perfectly to look right, and Brenda is a self-proclaimed perfectionist. “I took pictures and brought them to the Rustic.” The Rustic was a Plattsburgh drapery and upholstery factory. It was there that a woman named Pam taught her all of the tricks of the trade. When she’d learned all she could, Brenda took a job running the upholstery department at another local factory called Larson’s.
Three years in, Brenda began training a new woman named Martie Wilkins. “Martie had raised her kids and did the PTA thing at the school,” Brenda says. “When she turned 40, she told her husband, Wayne, who was a corrections officer, ‘I want a job and a car.’”
Martie bought an Orange Mustang and applied for a job at Larson’s. “They saw some of my work and asked Brenda if I was trainable,” Marti says. Larson’s hired her and she worked with Brenda for the next three years. “She taught me all the ins and outs of upholstery,” Martie says.
Then it was time for Brenda to make another jump. Another upholsterer in town was selling his building and it looked like Larson’s would be up for sale soon. “Things were kind of iffy with Larson’s,” Brenda says. “I told Martie: If we’re going to do this, now’s the time.”
Martie agreed, and the two jumped in. They opened Northland Upholstry, and ran it together for nearly 20 years. “We had a lot of fun together,”
“For years, we were in business together and Brenda was a great partner,” Martie remembers. “You know, in order to be in business together you have to trust each other completely. We did.”
All in all Brenda has been doing upholstery for nearly 29 years. “I’ve been doing this all my life, it seems like,” she says. She enjoys most of the work, but after all the years, there’s still one job she refuses: automotive. “Some people love it,” she says emphatically. “I don’t!” Automotive upholstery deals heavily with vinyl, which doesn’t stretch. “I’m a perfectionist, and if I don’t do it just right, I gotta take the whole thing apart.”
She really knows every aspect of the trade and has worked on nearly every kind of antique chair, settee, loveseat, and couch you can imagine. She even makes house calls, and has decorated some entire camps. “I love picking out the fabrics and matching them from room to room.”
Martie, who is nine years older than Brenda, has retired from the business, and Brenda has since been running the shop on her own. Sometimes, the work can take a toll on her body. “It gets harder as you get older,” she says. “I saw what it was doing to Martie, and didn’t realize it was happening to me too.”
Reworking antique couches, among other furniture, involves stringing large sets of metal coils together to make a seat, and this requires a lot of pulling and twisting. The work has taken its toll on Brenda, and she has had to under go muscle therapy because her shoulder was dropping and her whole body was leaning. “It’s not just the stretching and pulling, it’s lifting the things up on the sawhorses too!”
She still likes what she’s doing though. “I still like it. When I feel good, I like it,” she says with a big smile. She can’t help but smile as she talks about her work. Any tool or piece you ask about, she’s happy to explain everything she knows about it from how it works, to where she got it. She keeps before and after photos of every thing she’s done, and the books and envelopes seem to be endless.
The hardest thing she’d ever done was a large swoop back chair, but she meets every piece head on. She’s even reworked a piece from the 1750s. On old pieces like that, Brenda often even works with the original stuffing. “The new stuff just isn’t built to last,” she says. The blue velvet piece in the window contains original moss and horse hair stuffing between its newly restrung coils.
Picking fabrics and coordinating patterns may take a creative eye, but the real art of what she does is restoring completely beat furniture to a beautiful new piece. “I don’t give people deadlines on things like that,” she laughs. “I’ll get things for weddings and proms in on time, but it’s a struggle.”
Brenda is torn sometimes about her work and her customers because she takes her time with every piece. “I try to be fair, but I don’t always get what I should get for some of the stuff. I see things that I want to see people keep and not just throw out, but I can’t do it for free.” When it comes to that she tries to get people to try it themselves, sort of jump right in like she did. “I’ve guided some people through some things, and I always say, if you get stuck, throw it in your vehicle bring it in and say HELP I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!” she shouts in high-pitched energy. She even taught classes in a spot at the air-force base and often thinks of going back to it. “I can’t do this forever, you know?”
Reupholstery isn’t a common trade, and there aren’t many people like Brenda out there. Not just because of the trade she’s mastered, but because of the genuine friendliness and energy she gives. “It’s a dying art,” Brend says. “We’re a dying breed.”
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