19th Century British Plantation Chair Re-Caned

Plantation Chair
After

Plantation Chair
Before

Large, one of a kind and very labor intensive, this is a 19th Century British Plantation chair which was in dire need of new caning due to the broken seat area. This was definitely the largest caning chair I had ever done and possibly the largest chair I had ever worked on. I had never seen anything like it, so after some research, I discovered its origin. Used by plantation owners, chairs such as this were preferred for veranda seating due to the caning, which allowed easy air flow to cool its occupant. 

This chair had a feature that I had never seen, dual caning. The front of the chair had strand (woven) caning and the rear had press-in caning. I knew I had a great deal of work ahead of me when I took on this project and I was absolutely right. Because of the sheer size of the chair, it was difficult to reach the farthest points in the curved portion of the chair. There was a lot of stretching and reaching to achieve the results required to make this chair work.

I had to be creative with following the curve of the seat by using a cardboard sleeve to keep the caned strands somewhat even while weaving the strands from the top to the bottom edges of the chair. Since the strands had to follow the lines of the chair and stay loose, it was hard to determine just how loose they needed to be. This was quite difficult. Once I accomplished that, it was time to begin the actual horizontal weave. The farther down I got, the more difficult it became. I had to twist and turn my body to reach these distant areas. (See photo below). Eventually I finished the entire front and tackled the back. This was difficult because the front caning came through the part where the back push-in spline had to go. Suffice it to say it was quite challenging. I was extremely happy to be finished with this chair that took about six weeks of labor intensive work to complete.

Rene's weaving of
the plantation chair