Leather Furniture Guide: Top Grain to Bonded Leather

Knowing What to Ask For

First and foremost, shopping for quality and value in home furnishings is about knowing exactly what you are paying for. With such a wide range of retail price points for living room furniture, it’s important to see past the commissioned salesman's jargon to know what you are getting for your dollar. Nowadays, cheaper manufacturers have found savvy ways to throw the word ‘leather’ around while meaning something completely different. The best course of action is to find a furniture store near you and always to ask a salesperson directly about the construction, fabric, leather, and warranty. Before you buy, make sure you're getting the straight talk you deserve.

What Is Bonded Leather?

"Bonded leather" is a cheaper manufacturer’s first line of attack in selling you the look and feel of leather for a “great deal.” Unfortunately, bonded leather is hardly leather at all—by definition, it has to be only 17% leather. So leather is to bonded leather what chicken is to chicken McNuggets (or pressboard to wood, or dryer lint to fabric): In other words, it's processed beyond recognition.

When a leather cowhide is taken into manufacturing, cookie-cutter-like shapes are cut out of the hide to make panels that will eventually make the seat cushions, backs, arms, and sides of quality leather furniture. When you are cutting cookies, there will always be scraps outside the cuts of these panels that are too small to use whole. This is where bonded leather begins. These scraps are ground up in a machine into even smaller pieces that are laid out in a long, thin layer and then adhered together with a thicker layer of polyurethane (plastic).

While bonded leather, being merely a "leather product," prices out (foot for foot) similar to a fabric—and in the sense may be more economical—it is, unfortunately, used all to often in misleading customers, as retailers may try to pass it off as the real thing in order to inflate the perceived value of their product.

In reality, a person sitting on bonded leather is not sitting on leather at all, only plastic. And unlike real top-grain leather, the ground-up hide and plastic will never acclimate to your body temperature or get better with age.

What Is Bicast Leather?

Bicast leather (also known as bi-cast, bycast, or PU leather) is what most people consider the next step up in quality.

Before a hide is put into production, it is cut horizontally into layers. These layers consist of the top grain (the top layer that maintains the actual surface of the cow's hide where the pores and hair follicles used to be) and then every split below that.

Bicast leather is a layer of split which was too thin or flawed for normal use and that, like bonded leather, is completely sealed on top with a layer of polyurethane. Like bonded leather, no actual point of contact is possible between the natural leather and your skin and, therefore, bicast doesn’t demonstrate any of the same wear or comfort attributes of top-grain.

That being said, bicast can still serve as an economical alternative for people wanting the look of leather without the price. Another benefit might be that bicast and bonded leather wipe up easily (since they have plastic surfaces) and you won’t run into many of the food/drink stain issues you may experience with upholstered furniture. . . continue reading!