The books of fabric samples that once lined the pegboard-covered walls are disappearing.
Cardboard boxes are slowly filling with staple guns, tack hammers and the hand tools that have rarely been idle over 51 years.
Only a handful of pieces remain to be finished before the lights go out for good at Cranson Custom Upholstery in an industrial Park off Priest Drive near Broadway Road in Tempe.
Come Aug. 31, Alan Cranson will be turning the lock on the 4,400-square-foot workroom for the last time – closing a piece of Tempe history and a Valley titan’s presence in an industry that’s taken its share of hits from DIY furniture and cheap foreign imports.
For 51 years, Cranson Custom Upholstery has been a place where worn-out pieces of often treasured furniture were resurrected.
"It's time," Cranson said matter-of-factly about closing the room where thousands of chairs and sofas over decades gained new life.
And with it, Alan will be ending a career that began when the Tempe High School graduate decided he could learn enough in one single-semester upholstery class to make a living.
It also turned out to be enough to leave a mark on Tempe and the Valley.
If you've eaten at Serrano's Mexican Restaurants, you've sat in one of Cranson's booths. If you've visited the Tempe History Museum, you've seen one of his custom pieces, a replica of Sun Devil Stadium.
And you may well have visited one of the thousands of homes across Metro Phoenix that still hold sofas, chairs and heirlooms restored by hands most people never knew belonged to Alan Cranson, his brother Paul and, more recently, his son and grandson.
He never sought recognition for any of it.
"I've never really liked being in the spotlight," he said.
Instead, he let the work speak.
An enterprise born in a garage
In 1975, Alan and his younger brother, Paul, weren't seasoned craftsmen, just young guys looking to make a living.
Growing up on Farmer Avenue and attending Tempe Elementary schools before Tempe High, they often rode their bikes around a very different Tempe.
“Tempe was small in the early 1960s,” Alan recalled. “Downtown Tempe was like Mayberry. And most of this industrial park was still open fields, way back then,” he said of the place he’ll be leaving soon.
Alan got his start of sorts at a little shop on Broadway at Farmer called Tempe Sales that closed five years ago.
“They were in the upholstery and drapery supply business, and we lived basically 200 yards from the store,” he explained. “I was the young teenage kid who did the gopher work, stocking shelves and sweeping floors. Over the years, I got to be part of the staff, doing some deliveries and pickups.
“And I got to know about upholstery and draperies. Paul was right behind me,” he said of his brother, five years his junior.
There was no craftsman who took Alan under his wing and taught him the upholstery arts.
“We pretty well were self-taught," Alan said.
Working out of their father's garage, the brothers slowly built a business one chair at a time.
Their first shop in 1975 occupied just 1,000 square feet at First Street near 48th – in an area that is now State Route 143 and that was located on a paved river bottom.
One day five years after they had set up shop, a flood overtook the area, turning their business into an island that Alan and Paul reached by an aluminum motorboat “to go and check the shop to see if it was still high and dry.”
It was.
But the brothers decided to relocate to their present location.
Seeing what others didn’t
The brothers shared all the duties, eventually bringing in Alan’s son Joel as well.
“Paul does a lot of the custom work and cutting and sewing – and so do I,” Alan said. “There’s a good balance there because Paul, myself and Joel share all this.”
What kickstarted the brothers’ business was their work for an interior design center that had separate workrooms for draperies, upholstery, flooring, tile and painting.
Cranson Custom Upholstery got connected to it through a friendship Alan and his wife had developed with Janice Benton, a downtown Tempe interior design shop owner.
When Benton learned about Alan’s trade, she invited him to her interior design class at Mesa Community College to show how he upholstered a chair.
After the lesson, Benton told him, “You can take the chair to your shop, and I'm going to pay you to re-upholster it. So that was our very first contact with the interior design trade, and it mushroomed from there.
“She had three or four designers on her staff. They started sending us work, and then other designers found out about us and it grew from there.”
An art of possibilities
Ask Alan what he enjoyed most about his trade and he doesn't mention famous clients or complicated projects.
He talks about possibilities: "Creating something that looks like it's ready for the dump and making it look better than new."
That philosophy kept customers returning for decades.
Some brought dining chairs that had been in the family for generations.
Others wheeled in recliners worn soft by years of use or sofas where children had grown up.
They weren't just paying to replace fabric.
They were preserving memories.
"They didn't want to see it go in the dump," Cranson said.
As for the business, he said, “We had a nice balance” between commercial and residential work that eventually expanded into “building custom headboards, custom window boxes, custom beds, custom footstools.”
“I have an outside source for frames. He would build the frames, like for a sofa. He’d build the sofa frame, and we would spring it up, pad it up, and upholster it from the ground up.”
Changing industry
With fabrics costing anywhere from $40 a yard to $180, Alan said “We didn't sell a lot of the $180 stuff.
“There was kind of a sweet spot there to make it worthwhile for the customer to invest in re-upholstering as opposed to buying new.”
Although new and out-of-box furniture were its biggest competitor, Cranson Custom Upholstery benefitted from nostalgia.
“We also had the mindset – a lot of people did. They didn't want to see it go in the dump. They wanted to repurpose it and give it a new life. And then there was the ecology mindset – we had quite a bit of that.”
“Back in the early days, the fabrics were a lot cheaper and so was the labor. It was cheaper to re-upholster than to go buy something new.
“But that was before all of these furniture distributors that have this stuff made in China, or you assemble it yourself, and it's really cheap. I've always called that disposable furniture. You wouldn't ever bring it to my shop and spend any money to make it new again.”
A new chapter
Retirement won't leave Alan idle.
He plans to finish restoring his 1949 Ford pickup, travel Route 66 with his wife and spend more time with his grandchildren.
He’s been working on the Ford for almost 20 years, restoring it mechanically after taking it all the way down to the frame.
“I've always been a kind of a nuts-and-bolts grease monkey,” said Alan, who also raced motorcycles at the old Manzanita Speedway near 35th Avenue and Broadway.
He’s glad he’s got the Ford running, though the interior isn’t done and some body work beckons.
“I thought ‘I need to get this running and drive it for a while soon before I get too old to drive it,’” he explained.
But he also will have the satisfaction of having made old, often treasured things useful again.
Yet, it won’t be the work that he’ll miss when he turns the lights off for the last time.
Asked what he will miss, he replied, “You know, probably the biggest thing will be the staff because my staff has always been very consistent.
“Paul and I've been here forever. My seamstress worked here 19 years. The one before her worked 15 years. We had very little turnover. So it’s been a family.”