Restoring Niels Moller Chairs

About a year and a half ago we bought a set of six vintage Niels Moller Model 71 chairs on Facebook market place. Buying new, these chairs go for about $1000 CAD each, but we got all six of them for well under$2000. It was a really good deal what we paid for them. Four of the chairs were in good condition, but two of them were in really rough shape.

The original cording on two of the seats was stretched and loose in a lot of places and several of the cords had snapped altogether. There was also a pretty heavy layer of petina that had built up over the years, which made them look dirty on top of it all. One of the legs also had a verticle crack in it that I fixed with epoxy glue and a screw through the side, which I covered with wood filler. Now you can't even tell that it was ever damaged.

So all that being said, we did have to put in some additional time and money into their restoration if we actually wanted them to be functional.

Cutting away the old damaged cord

It took us a long time to find the right cording to use. The chairs are Danish and the cording on the seats is also from Denmark, so it wasn't easy to find in our area. We eventually did find a store that carried it in a neighboring town and bought two large rolls for about $100, if I'm remembering correctly.

The cord sat in the box next to the chairs for about a year or more before I decided to take on the project. I'm an excellent procrastinator, if nothing else. Once I got started it took me about a month to complete the job, picking away at it an hour or two at a time on weekends.

Front complete

Back complete

Notice the L-nails that the cord hooks around

Weaving

First chair finished

Starting the next one

There was a bit of a learning curve to it in the begining but I found a YouTube video that walked me through the process. The first chair actually went pretty smoothly, all things considered. I actually struggled more with the second chair for some reason.

Wasted cord from cuts on the first attempt

The second chair proved to be more difficult and I started over twice after making a few mistakes. It didn't quite turn out as good as the first one. The weave ended up being slightly tighter, which makes it less comfortable to sit in, and some of the verticle lines are on a slight angle. Also, some of the horizontal line have small spaces between them. These are all things that you can't really tell unless you inspect them thoroughly, so I'm not at all concerned. On the plus side I wasted a lot less cord on the second chair. I was able to weave the entire seat using one strand taken directly from the spool.

For the first chair I tried to estimate the amount of cord that I needed which didn't go well. It was an attempt to make the spool smaller and easier to manage but I came up short in my estimate multiple times. You can see what I mean in the photo above vs the one below.

The finished product turned out pretty good for me doing it myself, all things considered.

They look at least as good as the other four chairs that they came with. I figure that the other four were probably restored by the previous owner because the cording looks new and doesn't have the gross patina on it from decades of sweat, body oil and food spills.

The finished chairs fit well with our other teak furniture and the teak table that they go with.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.