Product Options and Choices
Introduction
We take every step in making furniture with our customer’s expectation of purchasing legacy pieces of furniture in mind, sure to provide many years of appreciation, comfort and enjoyment. Our product raw materials are internationally sourced to create the best quality and value for your investment. For example, we source the best furniture quality stainless steel from Asia, Sweden and USA; Drum aniline-dyed leathers from Italy, Sweden and Australia; and, Select veneers and hardwoods from North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Utilizing the expertise of master craftsmen joining us from around the world coupled with the best selection of raw materials enables us to bring you the best prices for high quality furniture craftsmanship you will find anywhere.
All of our products are created by teams of highly skilled craftspeople and fabricated from the finest materials available including full and top grain Italian Leathers, premium grade stainless steel, eco-based high resilient foams and certified sustainable forest stewardship hardwoods and veneers.
Request a material sample
We are happy to mail you a physical piece of leather, fabric or wood so you can hold it in your hands. Just give a call or email us with your address or fill our our Material Sample Request Form .
Leather Choices
Modern Classics Furniture purchases leather from a variety of tanneries in order to provide our own collection of colors. Not all leathers are available for use on all products. Each product in our catalog will indicate which leather is available for that piece of furniture. All the leathers we offer feature:
- Top-grain leather from Grade A hides
- Smooth or Textured, depending on the color
- Vegetable Drum Dyed with Moisture and UV protection built into the dye
- Made in Italy and imported to our factory
- No split hides or bonded leather
- Leather thickness is generally 1.0 - 1.2 mm
All our leathers are considered equally durable and are ideal for home or commercial use. To read more about leather, read our A Guide to Understanding Upholstery Leather: A Primer. Also, we are happy to mail you a physical piece of leather so you can hold it in your hands, using this link. Leather Sample Request Form
Our Standard Leathers (denoted with the prefix L1) are top-grain, aniline-dyed, and then color corrected with a slight embossing to create a more uniform grain pattern. Our Premium leathers (denoted with the prefix L2) are also top-grain, aniline-dyed but have a softer feel to them and much of the hides natural grain patterns are retained. Our Distressed Leathers (denoted with the prefix L5) are also top-grain, aniline-dyed but have a distressed look to them. L5 leathers will show rubbings and have a more waxy feel. All our leathers are considered equally durable and are ideal for home or commercial use.
Click on any of these images for an enlarged view.Standard Leathers (Top Grain - Textured)
Premium Leathers (Top Grain - Smooth)
Distressed Leathers (Top Grain - Waxy)
Modern Boucle Fabric Choices
We offer our own exclusive collection "boucle" textured fabric in an extensive collection of colors that are particularly suited for the mid-century modern furniture we make. This fabric and colors were custom made just for us, from a well-known North American mill. Made of 100% polyester, our boucle's are soft, durable (250K double rubs), stain and UV resistant. We have arranged these swatches in color groups below.
We are happy to mail you a physical piece of fabric so you can hold it in your hands, using this link: Fabric Sample Request Form
| Fabric Name: | Modern Boucle Fabric |
| Content: | 100% Post-Consumer recycled Polyester |
| Weight: | 22 oz/linear yard |
| Finish: | Greenshield™ (High Performance, Eco-friendly stain guard that beads liquids and easy to clean) |
| Abrasion Resistance: | 250,000 Double Rubs(ASTM D4157-13) |
| Crocking: | Wet: Class 5.0, Dry: Class 4.5 (AATCC 8) |
| Light Fastness: | Class 4.0 - 5.0 @ 40 hours (AATCC 16 3511) |
| Pilling Resistance: | Class 5.0 (ASTM D 3511) |
| Seam Slippage: | Warp: 85.8 lbs Fill: 125.20 lbs (ASTM D 4034) |
| Tensile Strength: | Warp: 177.0 lbs Fill: 234.0 lbs (ASTM D 5034) |
| Flammability: | Class 1 (CAL 117-2013) |
Wood Finish Choices
Exhibition Daybed and Benches; Saarinen Chairs
Here are the wood finish choices are available on our seating products: Exhibition Daybed and Benches and Saarinen Chairs.
Click on any of these swatches to see an enlarged view.
Metal Color Choices
For many of the frames, we offer 4 standard metal finishes colors besides the polished stainless steel. This is the add-on option for some of the metal furniture which we offer as standard in the polished stainless steel. While not all our our furniture offerings lend themselves to receiving an alternate finish, many do. The finishes here are all high-strength polyester powder coat. They are all suitable for exterior use, which means they are UV light stable and will not rust or chip. (Note, that while the frame may be placed outside, the foam and leather don't do well in the rain.) Prefer a different color like hot pink or baby blue? We can usually find the color at our powder coater supplier. Just send us a note. Click on any of these swatches to see an enlarged view.
Wood Frames:
We begin with the best quality hand selected kiln dried hardwoods. Most of our wood seating frames are constructed of American Ash hardwood harvested from certified eco-friendly forest plantations. This assures our customers the stability of construction necessary when building up a seating or case goods frame. We utilize tried and proven Old World joinery techniques coupled with world-class precision cutting and forming machinery offering quality wood furniture frames.
Steel Frames:
The frame is the structural beginning of any quality furniture piece. Most of our exposed metal frame designs are constructed of the highest furniture grade stainless steel. We use stainless steel because it offers a lifetime of value to our customers. It will not tarnish and it has an inherent quality of aging to an elegant and classic “soft patina character”. Stainless steel may be re-polished many times to restore the metal appearance to its original “new” appearance. Chrome steel plated frames do not offer these unique and superior qualities.
Seat Suspension Systems:
Our product engineers have developed a proprietary seat platform support system that is unique to many of our seating products. With advanced modern technologies in webbing support structure materials now available, we have developed a superior seat support system that supercedes the neo-modern “nylon strap support systems” and the “eight-way hand tied spring systems”. Unlike these old technology furniture methods of seat support that have tendencies to wear and sag, our system offers superior time and wear seat support.
Seat Cushions and Foam:
Modern Classics has one concept in mind with our seat cushions – comfort. We use only the highest quality seating cushion materials available. We tailor specific polyfoam layer densities and resiliency characteristics to fine-tune each furniture design for the best durability and comfortable fit for people of all sizes. Some designs demand extra-ordinary cushion requirements. For example, our Le Corbusier LC2 Petite Confort design is fine tuned with a bottom support multi-layer HR polyfoam with an added Dacron wrapped feather fill top cushion layer.
Various foam densities are commonly used on our seating products, e.g., softer seat and softer back on some of our models. The performance of the softer foam has exactly the same compression / memory return properties performance as the harder foam. This is a required specification for the various foam formulations we use in our seating products. This is true industry wide. Therefore, in order for us and many other manufacturers of soft seating to offer commercial grade seating, the overall performance characteristics of wear performance must be the same on all the density levels of the foams we use. Otherwise, no manufacturer could reasonably offer wear warranties on their seating products.
The foams we use are made of polyurathane and are supplied from a German supplier, one of the world’s largest and leading manufacturers of seating and bedding foam chemical products. Performance testing for density conformity, wear longevity, flame / smoke spread safety and environmental compliant chemical formula content is regularly completed on all of these foam products by an internationally recognized and internationally certified third party testing laboratory approved by numerous governments and industry associations worldwide. The foam we use in our products meet the qualification standards for Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, UK and the USA.
We primarily use softer. low density foam. The international standards for lower density (softer) foams generally cost as much or more than higher density (harder) foams. This is due to the requirement that molecular cellular properties / chemical formulas of the softer foams must meet the same performance criteria specifications as the harder foams. Therefore the actual material formulations of the softer foams for commercial grade seating are generally more or as costly than the harder density foams. Sometimes scientific physical properties appear to go against common logic assumptions, but this is the instance in foam manufacturing. We make every effort for our products to not only have upper market appearance and specification levels, but we also work to engineer our seating to provide the best comfort that may be achieved for a specific model range that will accommodate a wide range of people (weight, height, etc.).