How to Reupholster a Slip Seat

We love to share spaces and projects from interior designers who use our furniture pieces. They always have fresh takes on our favorite items!

Jana Bek is an interior designer with a fantastic eye for color and an even better sense of style. Through Bek Design, she works with clients all over the country to design spaces that suit her clients’ needs and budget. Today, she’s sharing how she added her own fabric to our Dayna Chairs to create a custom look. See her step-by-step tutorial below:

Our dining area was a sea of white, and as a lover of pattern and color, I wanted to inject a bit of both into the space. The solution? Reupholstering our beautiful new Dayna Dining Chairs! Recovering dining and accent chair cushions is an easy way to update your beloved pieces, so I’m excited to share the surprisingly simple steps with you today.

You’ll need:

• A chair with a slip seat cushion, like Ballard Designs Dayna Chair
• Fabric for your covers, plan for ½ yard per chair cushion.
• Electric staple gun and staples
• Scissors
• Screwdriver

Step One: Choose, measure, and order your fabric.

I recently launched a line of textiles and, playing favorites, I went with our Palm Beach Blooms. If you have kiddos, you may want to choose an indoor/outdoor fabric for ease of up-keep, I’m always partial to Ballard’s sunbrella canopy stripes for young families!

For most chairs, ½ yard of fabric will be a great fit. To be safe, measure your chair cushion and allow for a 4” excess of fabric at the cushion’s widest part. So, if your chair cushion is 20” wide and 20” deep, you’ll want a square 28”x28” to provide you with that 4” of allowance all around.

Step Two: Unscrew your chair cushions, then cut and position your fabric.

Laying your fabric on your work surface, face side down, then center your cushion, face side down upon it.

Step Three: Begin stapling.

Start by pulling the fabric taut, then staple itc down on the center of each side of the cushion back.

The corners of the cushions will be different shapes depending on your chair, but the goal is to pull the fabric taut in the corner excess and staple that down. Then, like the foot of a ballerinas shoe, you envelope the sides of the fabric to make a crisp corner – before stapling those sides down, I recommend cutting away the extra corner fabric. Then staple the other sides down.

After you have all four corners stapled, staple the remainder of the sides – every 1” or so, pulling the fabric taut before each staple.

Then voila, re-attach your cushions and enjoy! I hope this DIY inspires you to give a chair a new lease on life!

Didn’t Dayna’s space turn out beautifully? We love the way this chair fabric echoes the colors in her painting. See more spaces designed by Jana on her design blog, Bek Design, or check out her portfolio!

Browse more entryway inspiration on our Pinterest Board, or browse rooms from our catalog in our Photo Gallery.

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