My father, 1974

I never heard my father’s story from beginning to end. It came in pieces, over the years: from the craftsmen who grew up beside him, from people who knew him back then, sometimes from him. Here I have laid the pieces side by side.

From the archive: at the sewing machine.

In 1974, at fifteen, my father walked through the door of an upholstery shop in Istanbul as an apprentice, and he never came back out to this side of it. He slept in the shop. In the morning he was up before the masters, sweeping the floor and clearing the benches, so that when the day began there would be nothing left to sweep and his eyes could stay on the master’s hands. He held the webbing while it was stretched; he passed the next tack when the ones held between the lips ran out. There was no foam yet. A seat was built on wire and springs, with stuffing on top, and the fabric came last. When he tells these stories today he sometimes drifts away; the sentence stays unfinished, and I wait.

The room at home

From the archive: behind a sofa.

He turned a room of the house into a workshop. In the middle stood a single sofa, and for years that sofa knew no peace. Taken apart in the evening, sewn at night, taken apart again in the morning. The fabrics of those years were double-sided; turned over, a cloth began life again as new. The same sofa, the same cloth, each time a slightly straighter seam than the last. When I ask how many times he took it apart, he smiles. He never counted.

Mastery

From the archive: in an armchair.

In upholstery there is a threshold, and past it no one can teach you anything. You read the grain of the cloth yourself; you cut the velvet with the nap yourself; you set the damask pattern dead centre on the back yourself. My father crossed that threshold in that room, over that sofa. Today, passing a chair in the atelier, he lays a hand on the back and says nothing. The upholsterer understands. If the fabric has shifted by a millimetre he has it stripped and done again, and no one argues. He belongs to a generation that saw this work as art, not trade.

His own atelier

When he set up his own atelier, his first act was to take charge of the chair before the fabric as well. A good upholsterer cannot do good work on a poor frame; so in time wood, carving and gilding came under the same roof.

1984

The chairs that left the atelier were spoken of first from master to master, then from house to house. In 1984 the work was given a name: Artlife.

From the archive: before delivery, in the street.

Today

My father moves between the shop and the atelier. I draw, my mother Gülümser runs things, my uncle Levent sells; he is a master too. The carvers still draw the acanthus leaf before they cut it, the gilders still lay the gold with their breath, the upholsterers still fit the chenille without a single crease. And nothing leaves through that door until my father has seen it.

Altuğ Tuğrul

Translated from the Turkish.