In full disclosure, we should have gotten someone who is a little less personally involved in upholstery. I sit in chairs and couches, and I probably should not have led today's podcast. And I apologize if I brought too much emotion and judgment, or not enough. You're listening to Expertise, spelled wrong. The podcast where the world's most expert experts discuss their areas of expertise expertly. Expert comedy writer Clare Sera and expert comedy writer Danno Sullivan bring their expertise to other unrelated expertises. Danno, our audience tonight is composed mostly of upholsterers.
And that's your area of... Expertise! Spelled wrong? Naturally. We have with us today, Danno Sullivan. Good morning. Thank you for joining us tonight. Danno, you are a self-proclaimed expert in the most famous upholsterer that nobody knows. Up with upholstery, I say. Up with upholstery. Three chairs for upholstery. Three chairs. And you focused mostly on King Louis XIV's upholsterer. King Louis XIV's upholsterer. He got, of course, from King Louis XV. He was a hand-me-down upholsterer, and most of the furniture was handed down, too. So there was a lot of upholstery that needed to be done.
His name, he was simply called Monsieur. He was so well-known at the court of Versailles and throughout the second-hand shops of Paris that no name was needed, and Monsieur would suffice. Goodness. That was his name, Monsieur would suffice. Monsieur would suffice. Yes, Monsieur would suffice. So I did not realize that his father had been King Louis XV. That's a common confusion, Claire. It's a mathematical error. But if you think about it, of course, King Louis XIV's father had to be King Louis XV. It's like junior and senior. It must have been a very big job to reupholster the entire castle, because King Louis XIV's style was very different from his father's.
It went from a very austere style under King Louis XV to a much more flamboyant, much more grand and deluxe style under Louis XIV, the Sun King. If you can imagine a portrait of Louis XIV… I can. Probably what you envision is those long, flowing locks on his head. That was the same era as, say, Isaac Newton, also with those long, flowing locks. Almost like rollers, like they had rolls of hair. Yeah, there was so much hair. And it's no coincidence that these two fashion trends happened at the same time. So much of the upholstery of the palaces of the Sun King were actually done with the hair of the aristocrats of the time.
They could grow it out double, triple, quadruple speed sometimes. Isn't that the very reason that a piece of upholstered furniture from King Louis XIV's palace went for so much money recently? Because you could smell the head of the king. And that's so rare in this day and age, to have something that actually belonged to somebody of that stature from so long ago. That would be like having George Washington's hatchet or Napoleon's Bonaparte. But just imagine having the actual stink of the king as part of your furniture display. Wonderful. What we've been doing in the upholstery world is putting together scent-based décors.
So you might have drapes that have the stink of Clovis. Not cloves, but that's actually Clovis, the English king. You might have carpet that has the aroma of Queen Victoria. Well, and also I do remember reading that she liked to roll around on her carpet. That was one of her little quirks. I say little, she was a woman of some stature. Yeah, she needed especially big carpeting, if you don't mind me saying so. I don't mind you saying so. And I would not mind having the smell of Queen Victoria, a great queen emanating. A great queen and a great stinker. And that's a compliment in our world.
Yeah. She had what we call flop sweat. So she would just flop down on the carpet and start flopping around. And the more she flopped, the more she sweated. The more she sweated, the more those rugs would absorb. Now, you can't get an original carpet. Of course, that stuff just disintegrates. But what's left behind are those stains, those stinks, those stenches. Yes, right. That royal smell. And you know it when you smell it. It smells like history. So you start combining those into a full room decor. And you've got something that you can barely sit in for more than 20 minutes.
That is an odorous room. But, you know, our olfactory has got to be our most stimulating of the factories. Yeah, we're producing a lot of this stuff in olfactories now. So what are the wages in one of your olfactories? Oh, we pay in dollars. And cents. Do you yourself have any of the original pieces? Any of the Louis XIV? Yeah, what do I have? I have an entire room dedicated to all the Louises. Oh, the family of Louises. Yeah, there's Louis XIV, Louis XIII, and Louis XV. Those are the main furniture eras. But also Louisa May Alcott, Louis Armstrong. Those are some—Louis Armstrong?
Louis Armstrong era, really nice stuff. It's kind of cornet-based decor, usually in the key of B-flat. But what's really becoming an interesting sensation in the fashion decor world is the combination of smell, sound, and sight together. So that all the senses are really just overwhelmed when you come into a room. You might get the stink of Lafayette emitting from a chair while you're getting the blat of Mozart's symphonies. And, of course, the beauty that strikes your eye from the craftsmanship of Monsieur Wood's device. Sure, all that embroidered hair tapestry.
So you've come a long way from studying at the University of Wisconsin's How to Build a Chair 101. Yeah, I started with nothing more than a stick of wood and a pocketknife. And you covered your first chair in something that was a little bit more And you covered your first chair in something kind of unusual. And I'm guessing that's what led you to study the masters of the unusual materials. Yeah, coming from Wisconsin, of course we have to use the local supplies. And, well, it was the whiff of cheese that got me started with my first idea of using scent as part of an upholstered product.
Yeah, your cheese chair. Literally made of blocks of cheese. The seat itself had a cushion of cottage cheese for comfort with just the holes from some Swiss cheese for ventilation. And, again, on purpose, the heat of the buttocks bringing out the oils of the cheese. Well, not just the oils, but there's a pasteurization process that goes on so that the chair actually improves as it's sat on. We started getting orders for the cheese chairs coming in and we couldn't fill the orders quickly enough so we had to sort of mechanize the process. We eventually wound up using Velveeta because it was a pre-made product.
It's like using plywood in a traditional wooden chair. But we'd switch over to the Velveeta and we could just whip those out. You did get, eventually you got sued. The chairs never lasted for more than a month. They did tend to attract rodents. And in Wisconsin, whew, let's talk about the rodents. Right. Okay, happy to. Because your next chair was covered in... Yeah, in living rodents. Yes. This was intended to be controversial. This was not intended to be comfortable. Although, wow, what a surprise. Because once the rodents died en place, in place. Thank you.
Those living pelts developed all the things that became such a part of my future techniques. Yeah, the smell, definitely. The stench of a dead muskrat clear. Yeah. Oh my gosh. But it's got those enfolded flaps of fat that just nestle about the haunches of the sitted one. We had other rodents besides the muskrat, but that was what we focused on because they were so readily available, so comfortable, and so odiferous. Oh my goodness. I think Susie and Sam both gave their lives for your career. That day in muskrat land. Yeah. I think we're carrying on the idea of incorporating animate and inanimate together to create the comfortable and the splendid.
Yes, the comfortable and the splendid, which is the name of your book. Yes. I'm very proud of the book, Claire, and I thank you for mentioning it. If we could get it into the show notes. Yeah, we have a link in the show notes, too. That'd be great. Well, you are an artist dedicated to your craft, and you were looking for ways to take the life out of these muskrats without ruining the pelt. Yes, you want the most attractive, usable, valuable remains that you can get. But, you know, gosh, it's all done from a position of respect. Every aspect of the muskrat is used.
So much of it is used within the chair itself. But we would sell the meat to a local hand pie manufacturing. The teeth were used for necklaces, voodoo necklaces to ward off evil. I do have to admire you for using every part of the animal. I mean, it's thrifty, it's upcycling. But the animal rights people, Claire, just come out of the woodwork for something like that. It's hard to please people sometimes these days. I just want to thank you on behalf of our listeners. I can't tell you how many people wrote in requesting that we speak with an upholstery expert.
No one requested you by name, but they did request an upholstery expert, and you were the only one we were able to get. And we were so thrilled that we could think about that. I could give you some references to some other upholstery experts. Yeah, that would be great. Okay, yeah, sure. Maybe we might hold off on publishing this podcast. The Expertise Spelled Wrong Podcast is free, and like the Amish, all are welcome. Be sure to sign up for our email announcements at funnypodcast.com and follow us in your favorite podcast app, like the expert podcast listener we know you are.
