How a hide is tanned, what vegetable-tanning actually does to a hide over thirty years, and how to read a leather chair before you buy one.
Full-grain, vegetable-tanned leather is tanned with bark and chestnut extracts rather than chromium salts. The process takes weeks rather than hours, and the tannery smells of it for most of that time.
A tanner selecting a hide is looking for a balance of grain and softness: leather that will darken and soften with use rather than crack and peel. That is the whole argument for the material, and it is the reason a leather chair and a vinyl one do not age the same way.
On a frame, the detail that decides how a chair ages is the joinery beneath the leather — a frame that is glued and pinned will work loose as the timber moves, while one that is joined stays tight. The Lounge Chair in the catalogue is specified around that, and the lead time we quote with your order is part of the same subject: what it is made of, and how long it takes.
We do not publish a tannery or a workshop on this site, because we would rather tell you where a piece comes from when you ask than print a claim we have not checked.