Old favorites find new life at Galaxy Foam

By Kristen Peterson

Wednesday, May 2, 2012 | 4:04 p.m.

Furniture, inarguably, can have the best stories to tell. Provenances are colored with wacky stories, finders’ tales and multiple hand-offs that result in either a great-looking sofa or a ramshackle chair on its last and final leg. Enough trips to certain Valley homes and businesses will tell you, “Never give up.”

Such is the advice one could get from the knockout orange vinyl sofa on wheels in artist Tim Bavington’s studio. The clean-lined couch that looks like it was plucked from the showroom of a high-end LA boutique was actually bought for $30 from a toothless woman on the side of a road in Garden Valley, Texas, by artist Steven Spann. It wound up in a Downtown furniture store with a modern bent before finding its way to Bavington’s studio and getting reupholstered to its stylish glory.

All it took for its final nip and tuck was a trip to Galaxy Foam on Charleston Boulevard, where ample rolls of fabrics await and stacks of business cards on-site give buyers a selection of people they might hire for the job. Or, you can grab a staple gun, sharpened scissors, online instructions and intuition, and do it yourself.

That Galaxy Foam is in the process of moving to a new location in North Las Vegas at the end of the month shouldn’t deter anyone from perusing its selection. The company services a lot of industry people and keeps in stock vinyl, tweed, suede, canvas and other fabrics for sale by the yard. Anyone with a vinyl fetish can pick through spools of yellows, blues, grays, blacks, purples, reds and greens. A collection of marina material for boats includes glitter hues and dense, patterned options. Tweeds come in all the basic colors.

Animal or camouflage prints are part of the rotation, as is trampoline material. You’re probably thinking that all this has the makings of a great tuxedo line, and I agree. But most shoppers come for the furniture options, which include foam to replace indented cushions and fresh legs to swap in for broken, chipped or missing ones. Or, you could do what the Bavington crew did and add wheels. Pillow stuffing? They have it in stock.