Advice on Leather

[Stephanie]

Duane,
Thanks for all your wonderful advice. This website is a godsend.
We're getting ready to purchase the H&M Claudette sofa and two Chase chairs. I've been at the store looking at leather samples, and it's driving me nuts because the swatches look so different from photos of furniture. I've been staring at the Columbia acorn, and after spending about 4 hours on this site looking at photos, I'm thinking about the Antelope Harness, as well. But it's so hard to tell from those 6 inch swatches what a big piece of leather will look like.
I'm also trying to convince my husband that we should select a second leather for the chairs, so that all three pieces stand on their own. You seem to have a great sense of design, do you have any suggestions for a second leather that might look good with a Claudette sofa in a warm, medium brown? (I'd also love to hear what you think about mixing the Claudette and the Chase!)

Thank you!

Stephanie

[drcollie]

Hi Stephanie (moved your post to the general LEATHER forum):

My advice is to not rely on the photos you see here on the forum for color accuracy. Most the ones I take are outdoors in bright sunlight, and I do not spend the time to color correct them in Photoshop (My Nikon D40 tends to overexpose a little bit), nor do you have a color corrected monitor to view them on. Mostly I take the shots to show the form of the piece at a different angle than the ones on the maker's website. Better to use the actual samples themselves for color accuracy, but even they will vary from batch to batch of leather.

My tastes would say definitely do the sofa in one color, and the chairs in a contrasting one. Its difficult to say what color would work for you, because I don't have your room photos to look at the overall look of things. However just based on Antelope Harness alone for the sofa, perhaps the chairs in Antelope Saddle? A 'decorator' tie-in you can do at no extra charge is to have the welt trims on each piece done in the contrast color if you like. That would mean the sofa in Harness could have welt trim in Saddle and vice versa on the chairs.