Custom upholstery, what it actually costs and how long it actually takes
Summary: Custom upholstery prices are mostly labour, fabric, foam, webbing, trim, and lead time. Before searching for custom upholstery near me, check whether the frame is worth saving and whether you want a recover, a new shape, or a custom-fit frame with separate cushions.
We have a 1970s two-seater in the living room that came from my partner's grandmother. The frame is beech, joined with dowels and corner blocks, still rock solid. The fabric is a brown-orange weave that was probably handsome in 1974 and is now mostly threadbare. Last winter we got three quotes to recover it.
The cheapest was 1,250 euros. The most expensive was 3,400. Same sofa.
That gap is the whole story of custom upholstery. The price isn't really the price. It's a stack of decisions, half of which you don't know you're making until the upholsterer asks.
What you're actually paying for
A reupholstery quote covers four things, roughly in this order of cost: labour, fabric, foam and webbing, and trim.
Labour is the big one. A two-seater takes a skilled upholsterer somewhere between 18 and 30 hours depending on the frame. A wing chair with deep buttoning can hit 40. A chesterfield with hand-tied springs and proper deep buttons is closer to 60 hours, sometimes more. At 55 to 75 euros an hour, which is roughly what a small workshop in the Netherlands or Germany charges, that's where two thirds of the bill comes from.
Fabric is the most visible cost and the easiest to over- or under-spend on. A two-seater takes about 9 to 11 metres if the pattern doesn't need matching. Plain fabrics start around 35 euros a metre at the budget end and go past 200 for proper upholstery-weight wool or linen blends. A patterned fabric with a 60 cm repeat can need 14 metres because you're losing material to alignment, which surprises people.
Foam and webbing are unglamorous and worth the spend. A foam refill on a sagging seat cushion runs 80 to 160 euros for a two-seater. New webbing on the seat deck is another 70 to 120. Skip these and the new fabric will look great for three weeks and tired by Christmas.
Trim, piping, buttons, zips, feet: a few hundred euros that nobody talks about until you see the line item.
"Custom upholstery near me" usually means one of three places
When you search for custom upholstery near me, you're going to land on three kinds of business. They do different things and price differently.
The first is the small independent workshop. Two to four people, a workshop in an industrial unit on the edge of town, twelve weeks lead time because they're booked. These are the people you want for a frame you care about. Expect honest quotes and proper materials.
The second is the high-street curtains-and-loose-covers shop. They'll do upholstery as a sideline. Quality varies wildly. Some are excellent, some are putting staples through century-old frames. Ask to see finished work before you book.
The third is the chain reupholsterer. They do volume, they have showrooms, they have fabric books with thousands of options. They're often quick (six weeks) and the work is fine, but you're paying for the showroom rent and the sales process. About 20 to 30 percent more than a small workshop for the same job.
What the upholsterer wishes you knew
Three things, on repeat, from every workshop I've talked to.
One: the frame matters more than the fabric. If the frame is solid, recovering is worth it almost regardless of cost. If the frame is stapled-together pine with a wobbly back leg, you're putting 2,000 euros of work into something that'll fail in five years. Test it: sit on it, lean back hard, listen. Creak is fine. Crack is not.
Two: bring the room, not just the swatch. Photos of the room, with daylight and the actual lamp on. Hold the fabric sample against the wall for two days before you commit. Fabric in a workshop showroom looks different from fabric next to your bookshelves at 7pm in November.
Three: lead times are real. A small workshop quoting twelve weeks means twelve weeks. They're not padding. Fabric ordered from Italy can sit at customs for three weeks on its own. If you need the sofa for a specific event, start four months out.
When custom upholstery isn't the answer
Sometimes the honest advice is don't recover it. If the frame is gone, or the proportions of the original sofa are wrong for the room you have now (it happens, rooms change), the maths doesn't work. A 2,800 euro recover on a sofa that's 2.1 m long when your new flat needs something closer to 1.85 m is just an expensive mistake.
The other place it falls apart is when you actually want a different shape. Upholsterers can change a lot, but they can't change the frame's bones. A boxy 1980s two-seater isn't going to become a low Italian-style sofa no matter how good the fabric is. If what you actually want is a different shape, you're looking at a new piece, not a recover.
A cheaper path that isn't IKEA
The thing nobody mentions: most of the cost of a sofa isn't the upholstery, it's the frame and the supply chain around it. A flat-pack frame, cut to the dimensions you actually have, with cushions and covers ordered separately from a local maker, can come out at 40 to 50 percent less than a finished bespoke piece, and you can recover it whenever you want without paying the labour twice.
That's not custom upholstery in the strict sense. It's adjacent. It's the move when you want bespoke fit without the bespoke-finished-product price.
We ended up keeping the grandmother's two-seater, by the way. Got it recovered in a heavy linen at the small workshop on Czaar Peterstraat. 1,800 euros, eight weeks, foam refilled, webbing redone. It'll outlast us.
If you're sizing a frame to fit a wall or an alcove and want the structure pre-cut so all you're commissioning is the upholstery on top, that's the kind of thing knuslabs.com was built around.
If you're planning the same kind of project, start with custom furniture design from room photos or compare it with AI room design for furniture concepts. For adjacent planning detail, read A custom ottoman is mostly a measurement problem and What to figure out before commissioning a custom sectional.