At the flicks - Axelle Young

I fell into upholstery quite by accident and then I fell in love with it. Not a big surprise for anybody who knows me! I've always had a fetish for chairs. Particularly theatre chairs.

When I was training as an interior designer in New York, I lived in a small apartment in Brooklyn. My only piece of furniture was a set of 3 theatre chairs I had brought with me from Paris.  My best friend and I would sit in these chairs with pizza and a beer and pretended we were at the movies (in the absence of a TV!). Made for silly but hilarious nights.

I didn't take them with me when I moved to London and will never quite understand why not!!  So a few years later when my husband told me he had heard of a theatre selling all their chairs due to a refurbishment, we jumped on the opportunity and bought a few.

This pair of parrot chairs is the first set I reupholstered and they mean a lot to me actually. A lesson in resilience the whole way through, but they turned out perfect, a little tropical heaven of a chair!

And they have history too. They were donated twice, from one West End theatre to another, then to the legendary Theatre Royal Stratford East from which we got these beauties.

More are available and you can even choose your own fabric.

Take a closer look at Axelle's cinema chairs.