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I actually beat my chest like a gorilla after photographing and sitting in the chair, above right. What a feeling to finally see the finished result after rescuing these battered classics from a curb where they’d been put out for the trash man.

In fact, our re-imagined MR Chair is just a test run, a prototype that allowed Mike and I to work out the kinks and confront the various construction challenges before we made a cut in the real McCoy, a fantastic, 60-square foot, freckled cowhide that set us back $225 (at Tandy Leather Factory). The hide is just big enough to accommodate three seats and three backs; one false move and we’d be up a creek, so we purchased a smaller, cheaper hide, above, to practice on. A wise move as it turned out . . .

I was inspired to take on the MR Chairs (click here for part one of the transformation) after seeing the photo above right, of some similar Marcel Breuer chairs with lace-up backs and seats. How hard could it be? Cut the leather, punch some holes and lace it up, right?

Well, it’s not quite that simple. The hair-on hide presents unique advantages and challenges. It’s not as stretchy as the finished leather on the Breuer chairs, which is a plus, but cutting the hide is delicate business. The trick is to cut the skin but not the hair, which then makes a lovely fringe along the edges. Mike made seat and back patterns out of some remnant fabric and we traced them onto the skin side of the hide. I did a little happy dance each time I successfully made a cut without also shearing the hair.

The nice folks at Tandy advised us to make a fold and glue it down along the edge where the grommets would go for extra strength and durability. This worked like a charm but after marking and punching the holes, below, we discovered that the grommets they’d sold us were too large, either that or the punch was too small. We’ll have to rectify this situation before we can move on to the freckled hide. We went ahead with our prototype using no grommets at all.

Another problem we had to work around was the construction of the MR Chair, which has two crossbars, one at the front of the seat and one at top of the back. If we emulated the Breuer design, these bars would be visible, not to mention uncomfortable, so we added a flap to our pattern that would wrap around the bars. Cosmetically the solution worked well although the bar in the back is still less than comfortable: we’ve decided to pad it for the final execution.

So that’s it; a few missteps (Caution: X-Acto knives really are sharp!) but now we’re ready to move on to the real deal with confidence. We just need to get the right grommets and some stronger laces. In the meantime, behold our sexy test case–isn’t it a beauty?