About The School Of Upholstery and Alex Law

School of upholstery is a nationally significant upholstery school situated in the historic town of Faversham in Kent. Faversham is well known for its preserved buildings dating back to the 10th century, this bustling market town has been home to skilled crafts folk and practices for many hundreds of years. Latterly Faversham has become a hub for Antiques and regularly holds specialist Antique markets. The School is situated on the coastal edge of the town in a modern airy workshop designed with craft in mind. Originally intended as a Marquetry workshop it is flooded with natural light and has windows on two sides combined with skylights to give an open bright space to work in. The built in Air-conditioning means that the workshop can run at a comfortable temperature throughout the year. Within a 15 minute walk of a mainline and high speed rail station, the workshop also has adequate parking for students travelling by car. The workshop has a small kitchen/dining area and new for 2023/2024 the school has a separate materials library/study room all housed within the 1st floor studio.

Alex Law has been working as an upholsterer since 1989. He has followed the traditional formal path from apprenticeship, studying City and Guilds Advanced Furniture Craft at the world renowned London College of Furniture, through Journeyman years and on to Master Upholsterer.

Throughout his career Alex has worked with both the conventional traditional and more modern materials. He has always had an interest in developing products and natural sustainable seating systems have always a key pursuit within the industry. He has developed and progresses the industry’s wider understanding of how to learn from tradition craft practices and marry those techniques and materials with advances in technology. He works with leading national companies to deliver training programs fit for the challenges of working in the upholstery sector. During his career he has worked at many high end workshops in bench lead roles as well as in a training capacity both here in the UK and Overseas.

Alex spent eight years teaching at the London Metropolitan University (now the Cass School of Art and Design) including leading the Advanced Upholstery course.  Through teaching, Alex has honed his ability to communicate the complexities of the craft of upholstery into readily understandable and achievable skills that beginners and more experienced upholsterers can follow and has been a the forefront of driving inclusivity through sharing a simple passion for object, craft and techniques. Thousands of students have benefited from classes with Alex during his extensive 17 year career teaching. Students often reference his kindness and patience when guiding students through challenges both inside and out of the classroom.

Alex has written two books:  Quick and Easy Upholstery (CICO Books, 2008) and The Upholsterer’s Step-by-Step Handbook, (Pavillion, 2015).  Enabling readers to have access to his extensive knowledge. Combined Sales across both tiles and in multiple languages and in many countries have enabled tens of thousands of readers to have access to high level craft that they would otherwise not have been able to access.

More recently Alex featured in the BBC 2 series Saved & Remade, his stand out episode was initially watched by 1.7 million people and was a series record, with millions more views since and has gone on to be recognised as a bench mark episode for demonstrating the possibility of creating new forms with traditional upholstery techniques- www.bbc.co.uk/savedandremade