In the middle of the last century a factory in Coburg was turning out Spanish Renaissance fantasies for Melbourne dining rooms. Decro Pty Ltd worked both sides of the ledger, modernist one week and historicist the next, and its furniture later found its way into the Senate and Prime Minister's suites. These four chairs are the historicist side at full stretch, with tooled leather backs with a deep-embossed rosette, a punchwork border of small flowers, rows of hammered studs, and a pierced front stretcher carved like strapwork off a galleon.

Each back was embossed by hand, so no two rosettes sit quite alike, and the leather has burnished to a colour somewhere between saddle and cedar. They wear their years without apology. One chair has lost a small carved tip from the crest, so long ago and so quietly that you have to be shown where to look; another carries a patch worn clean through the leather, left exactly as it is and pictured in full. Past those two honest marks the set is remarkably even. The four also split into two pairs, two with a plain straight stretcher between the legs and two with a shaped, scalloped one. The likeliest reading is that the set brings together two near-identical Decro variants, but we would rather note the difference than insist on a reason. The timber and the leather have been cleaned and fed by hand, the seats left as they came, and all four stand firm and sit sound. Chairs made in Coburg pretending to be Toledo, and better for the pretence.