Daveyap

Not sure what you meant by the scent and very deep grains but based on your description, there is a good chance it may be Burmese Teak. By the way, the teak industry/trade is a very dirty business (run by criminals gangs and corrupt officials), I do not mean the teak furniture retailers but the wholesalers/traders dealing with teak logs.

I find Lazyboy recliners to be the most comfortable in the market but they are also one of the most expensive.

Thanks for doing us all a big favour and public service by making the effort to post in here and it is much appreciated by all of us.

It is rather misleading for the sales person to say that recycled teak is better than normal teak without reference to the country of origin. If I throw away all my teak furniture made from plantation teak (Indonesian Teak) and the garang guni man picks it up from trash and recycles it, does that mean it now better than normal teak Perhaps it is more accurate to state that Burmese Teak is better than Indonesian teak and teaks from other countries as the grains are tighter (because they are felled when older) and retain more of the natural oils. Younger teak tends to crack when the surrounding is too dry and the cracking sound can be as loud as a gun shot and it usually occurs at night! As a general rule, good quality teaks are way in excess of 30 years old when felled. Teaks younger than 30 years would usually not be of good quality. $1,350 for a 1.5 m table made from recycled teak is pretty average. Not cheap, not expensive either.

Their parent company is a public listed company so that could explain their high prices.

It is ALWAYS best to custom make furniture if you have the budget for it because everything (styling, color, dimensions, special specifications, choice of materials etc) is stated down clearly in black and white.

Poor Bro Kalimantan. That will always be the case whenever you owned a good quality leather sofa set I faced the same problem too but there is really nothing much you can do about it as most comfortable chairs would usually be somewhat bulky or have a design that you will have some issues with storage when they are not in use.

I don't think you will go that far wrong with Castilla as they have been around for quite a while. I am sure those 8 leather dining chairs must be pretty nice, too bad not many people appreciate leather dining chairs.

Hi Kalimantan, I am not in the business so I will not be able to know which components in the sofa are non negotiable. Unless it is very high end furniture, the labour costs is usually not a substantial part of the manufacturing costs when you are dealing with mid and low end furniture range. The materials (leather, foam, wood frame etc) has always been and will always be where most of the costs lie. Shipping & storage costs together with local delivery charges may constitute up to 30% of the total costs to the importer/retailer. Space is always at a premium in the showroom as it is always limited so they have to try to display as many pieces as possible within a given time period. That is why we consumers must always roam around the furniture showrooms regularly in order to stand a better chance of catching them when they are in the midst of clearing their own or their suppliers' last few pieces in order to bring in a new or different range. That is when they have to lower their profit margins to a really low level. If you really want to have a good rough estimate of their profit margin, I would suggest you contact all those furniture companies in Alibaba and get the costing from them. They do offer individual pieces for sale but would mostly transact in 20 ft & 40 ft container loads. I roughly calculated their net profit margin to be as high as well over 100% and as low as under 20% but it keeps changing all the time for each and every shipment.

They dropped their standards because they were forced to drop their prices to compete with a lot of cheap imports from China and Malaysia. Their display sets are usually of quite good quality leathers and they give good discounts to clear them so it is worth considering if you don't mind the fact that hundreds of people have sat on them.

Just an update, been using the A.rte leather recliner for 2 weeks now. My wife seems to be enjoying the recliner on a daily basis. Not able to post a photo of the recliner here because my camera is busted. Seems every customer of A.rte Sofa has had a positive experience with them, myself included. Now pondering if I should do a custom design round sofa with them as their sofa leather quality is acceptable to me.

Castilla around since 1993, EL came into being only last year. Goodwill and reputation takes years to build up.

To be frank, their design is not that impressive but the quality of the leather used for their sofa is remarkably better than the rest of the furniture retailers out there. I am still wondering how come they are able to sell their full leather sofa at such prices and I can only suspect that the leather used may be the cheaper Buffalo hide.

Getting your maid to polish your leather monthly may not be a good idea as too much of a good thing can create problems of its own especially when it involves leather. Your leather sofa did great with just an annual polish so it is fine to maintain that routine. The professional leather cleaning companies' leather conditioners and cleaners are nothing special so you don't really need to use them but I order mine online from U.K.

I have no idea what the price range is for a 3 seater as I was only interested in their recliner which I bought at $1,100. The price that I paid for the recliner is not exactly cheap but it is the only recliner that I found so far that can fit into my limited living room space.

How come every time I type A.rte Sofa without the dot, it comes out as *spam? I think Renotalk Admin is overly strict about it.

My leather recliner was delivered to me on 8 Dec as promised by A.rte Sofa. Delivery was punctual and the recliner was delivered in mint condition as it was well wrapped up and protected. I don't think it is FULL Full Grain Cowhide Leather but nevertheless, it is a good quality FULL Top Grain Cowhide Leather so I am not going to make a big issue out of it. I cannot find any fault with it yet but if I do find any, I will certainly post it here.

I think he will only reply when he has the matter sorted out first. No point for EL to post a reply unless they are able to provide an explanation and solution.

I decided to use photobucket instead of waiting for Admin to reply me. It seems I am only allowed to attach 5 photos per post. Here are the remaining 2 photos of the 7 photos that Kalimantan sent me.

I am a newbie when it comes to attaching photos in the forum. Let me email the Admin to try another approach as it seems I can open and view it, but only from my PC.

You are not alone. One of the forum members here also had to postphone his sofa delivery from Castella because his renovation contractor delayed the home renovation works for nearly 2 months.

These are the photos of Kalimantan's $7000 Full Leather Sofa. This is what we meant by Full Top Grain Cowhide Leather. Kalimantan did not even maintain his leather sofa regularly and yet you don't see it falling apart, not even one teeny weeny bit. I especially like photo No. 4 as it showed very nice contrasting leather grain patterns. You will not get this level of quality leather sofa if your budget is $3K & below. It is always far better to just bear the one time pain of getting a really good quality leather sofa rather than go through the hassle of finding a new leather sofa all over again and disposing of your sub standard leather soda in under 3 years.

Ok. It will be my first time putting up images too. Let's see if I can do it.

Hi Kali, I have seen your photos of your leather sofa and given you my comments via email. You have a very good quality full leather sofa. A lot of people will be envying you. Cheers Dave

You need at least 200 cows for a recycled leather sofa set. Not joking here, it is really true you need several hundreds cows for recycled leather sofa set. You can imagine how strong recycle leather is when you have not 1, not 2, not 3 but 300 cows. It is a known fact that compressed wood which comprised of hundreds of thousands of tiny wood chips & shavings is far stronger than a single piece of solid hardwood.