Nearly 40 years in, Lidia and Nick Pastiu of Nick’s Upholstery are partners in the art of preservation.
WRITTEN BY KELLY AIGLON
PHOTOS PROVIDED BY NICK’S UPHOLSTERY & LIDIA’S DESIGN
Every piece of furniture that passes through Nick’s Upholstery in Fontana arrives with a history. Some come from Lake Geneva living rooms, others from North Shore estates, hotel lobbies, or the back of a truck pulled over at a curbside garage sale. There are chairs people are ready to give up on, benches that have moved through three homes without ever quite fitting, and heirlooms that carry more memory than comfort.
For Lidia Pastiu, co-owner and interior designer, a piece’s backstory matters as much as what it becomes next. Upholstery, she insists, isn’t about starting over. It’s about honoring what came before while adapting it for how people live now. “We really believe in old furniture because it’s better made and it lasts longer,” she says. “You find hundreds of years old pieces that are still in good shape. They just need a little bit of tender care.”
That care happens largely out of sight. Upholstery can be a simple change in fabric. But it can also be more dramatic, like renovation without drywall: the quiet work of taking a piece
down to its bones, resetting what’s sagged or snapped, rebuilding what actually holds you up, webbing, springs, joints, padding. The result isn’t meant to look new. It’s meant to feel right.
The Fabric Of History
Nick’s Upholstery has been in business for nearly 38 years, a longevity that mirrors the kind of furniture the Pastius champion. Both Lidia and her husband, Nick, emigrated from Romania as teenagers. She arrived at age 10 with her family; he came alone at 18. Nick trained in furniture-making in Romania. “You literally learn everything from scratch there,” Lidia explains. “From cutting the log, curing the wood, and building the frame, all the way to upholstery.”
That training shaped how Nick would later work in the U.S. After stints in Italy upholstering yachts and boats, and early jobs in Chicago high-rises, word began to spread. Bankers, lawyers, and office managers started asking him to reupholster chairs, waiting-room seating, entire floors at a time. Hotels followed, including The Drake, DoubleTrees, and Holiday Inns. Tight timelines were common. Overnight work wasn’t unusual. “Now that we think about it,” Lidia says, laughing, “it’s mind-boggling how much we did.”
A Past Well Honored
What never changed was the approach. Old furniture was respected for its structure, not dismissed for its wear. That mindset carries through the Fontana showroom today, where restored vintage pieces sit comfortably beside custom-made furniture and newly sourced items. A wing chair once discarded for being uncomfortable now has arms added, a subtle intervention that transforms how it’s used. A low-slung vintage chair gains an ottoman so its owner can relax into it. A battered garage-sale find becomes an outdoor-ready piece because the frame deserved another chapter.
Sentiment often drives the work. Clients arrive with furniture passed down from grandparents; they aren’t museum-grade antiques but are priceless all the same. Those projects call for a different kind of restoration, not strict historical preservation, but thoughtful updating. Padding is replaced. Springs are retied. Frames are repaired. Fabrics are chosen to suit how people live now, not how they lived decades ago. “They want to keep the history,” Lidia says. “But they also want to sit in it.”
That balance—honoring what was while making room for what’s next—feels especially resonant in spring, when the urge to purge is strongest. The Pastius offer an alternative to throwing things out. Furniture, Lidia notes, is one of the largest contributors to landfill waste. Upholstery, quietly, is recycling at its most human scale. Pieces are reused, materials are saved, and stories continue.
The Fontana Location
The Fontana location itself reflects that ethos. Purchased and restored by the couple in 2014, the building once housed an outdoor sports shop and, before that, a miniature golf course from the 1940s. Today, a creek runs behind it, greenery frames the space, and inside, fabrics are organized not just by color or pattern, but by durability and use. Thousands of options, sourced directly from manufacturers, wait to be paired with the right piece at the right moment.
Ask Nick what his dream home would look like and he smiles. In his imagination, every room would transport you somewhere else, like Paris through one door, Italy the next, and Florida down the hall. It’s not escapism so much as curiosity—the same instinct that drives him to rescue chairs from dumpsters or reimagine a dresser into a custom bar cabinet.
Upholstery, in the end, is less about furniture than faith in the fact that what’s worn still has value, that careful work can outlast trends, that renewal doesn’t require erasure. One stitch at a time, the Pastius keep proving that rebirth doesn’t have to look dramatic to be profound.
