An armchair is used differently to a sofa and it soils differently as a result. A sofa spreads three people's use across four or five square metres. A chair concentrates one person's use — the same person, in the same position, most evenings for years — into a fraction of that area. So the contact points on a well-loved chair are often heavier than anything on the sofa beside it: a dark band across the top of the back where a head rests, glossy patches on both arm fronts, and a seat cushion that has taken one household member's entire evening routine. It is why the favourite chair in a room is usually the piece that needs doing most and the piece nobody thinks to book.
Chairs also have shapes that hold soil in ways a sofa does not. A wingback has a crown at exactly head height and two wings that trap dust in the corners where they meet the back. A tub chair is one continuous curved panel with a tight seam at the base that collects everything the chair has ever been near. A recliner has a footrest that folds away with the underside facing outwards, a hinge area nobody has ever cleaned, and a gap behind the back that has been quietly swallowing remote controls, biscuits and coins for a decade. Cleaning the visible seat and arms of any of these and calling it done misses most of what is actually there.
Then there is the label problem, which affects chairs more than any other upholstered furniture, because chairs are what people inherit and what people reupholster. The care code — W, S, WS or X — is what decides whether water may be used at all, and on an older chair it has usually been cut off, painted over by a previous re-cover, or is simply wrong because the frame was recovered in something the tag no longer describes. Guessing here is how a good chair gets shrunk or ringed. Our technicians test a hidden section, read the result properly, and use the gentlest method that will still shift the soil. Book the inspection and you will know what you are dealing with before anything is applied.
