Classic Couches founded in 1982

Celebrated collectibles restorer and visionary E.L. Smith created the first car couch in 1982 and ‘Classic Couches’ was born. The first donor car, a 1956 Buick, was bought at a local junk yard, just outside of Mt. Carroll, Illinois. On Christmas eve surrounded by friends, Mr. Smith made the final cuts laying out the seating within the trunk area.
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Talent…
Over the years many skilled tradespeople have both started or ended their careers in restoration at ‘Classic Couches’. Each of those artists have brought their own ‘signature style’ to the car parts furniture that we create. It’s fun to see how their ideas have shaped our products. We often look back at things we do in the shop and who brought that unique detail to us. There was an ownership change in 2004, with Mr. Kreuder taking over daily operations. Although, creator E.L. Smith still checks in from time to time.

Facility…
              Interestingly ‘Classic Couches’ has returned to a revamped version of the original store that our uniquely styled car furniture was first started in. The ‘Sacred Turf’ has added plenty of square footage, office space, storage out buildings, and amenities. The main portion of our store is a historical 1940’s implement dealer ‘Young Impl Co’ that some design features remain. We invite you to visit the property located at 624 North Main St. Chadwick, IL. 61014 to see the fun space for yourself and learn more about the process of taking real junk yard cars and turning them into unique furniture or displays.  

Marketing…
              The marketing of our fully restored classic car furniture has changed over time. In the 1980’s our staff aggressively traveled to trade shows, vendor fairs, swap meets, and similar venues to expose the world to our style of car couch. Print publications such as automotive trade magazines and even Playboy were further outlets. Today we rely heavily on the reach of the internet, search engines and social media will lead interested parties to us. We do still partake in a half dozen or so ‘shows’ each year.

Projects…
            The foundation of ‘Classic Couches’ was built on the traditional couch made out of car parts. Furthermore, our mission has been to, generally speaking, build each project to fulfill a client’s specific vision. That allows each customer to get a unique piece of car furniture built with their choice of car, exterior color, interior color, dimensions, and individual details. You can see many examples here: sweetsofas.com/classic-car-couches Once we started building such high end car couches there became a demand to restore other original car related décor such as gas pumps, signs, pedal cars, drive in movie speakers, and similar. Around the time Mr. Kreuder took over the store in 2004 an upstart portion of the business was added, alongside our wildly unique car furniture creations we’re enjoying building, refurbishing, and fully restoring coin operated kiddie rides; you can learn more about those projects at riderestorations.com