Once you’ve finalized your interior design for your custom Defender, our world-class upholstery team gets started with your Defender re-upholstery. We reupholster every aspect for our ground-up rebuilds, even if you opt for new modern seats like the Recaro, Corbeau, or Puma style. The dashboard’s upholstery can also vary drastically depending on the infotainment and seat customization setup.

With every aspect of your custom Defender being hand-selected, designing the interior can be daunting with so many options. Your Defender’s seat customization is entirely up to you, from the stitch color to the type of leather and stitch patterns. Your main options for designing your custom interior involve re-upholstery material and color, stitch color and design, and design elements such as seat and dashboard style. For inspiration, ECD has over 300 unique vehicles in our showcase for you to use. In your welcome package, you will get samples of not only different materials but color and paint samples as well. It can be easy to overlook, but the color and material for your reupholstered headliner can entirely change the look of your build’s interior. Being the pros we are, ECD will show you any setup you can imagine, thanks to our 3D rendering design software, so that you can make changes before final approval. With final selections approved, our team starts with pulling from your selected material, which is usually anything from colored leather to animal hides.

Our Upholstery Team Lead, Angel, reviews your design, pulls the material and begins cutting patterns for the new interior. Depending on your seat customization, the Upholstery Team may have to cut out a range of patterns to cover the Defender’s interior. Jump seats, bench seats, and custom boxes all require a different and unique pattern. Once all the material is cut into patterns, Angel begins to both carefully and swiftly sew the upholstery together with practiced experience. The project can contain a simple design or a more challenging one based on your design. If the project has a more custom touch, such as double diamond stitch inserts or, as we’ve seen with Project Phantom, a honeycomb stitch design.

The Upholstery Team ensures all of the parts are stripped down and ready to be prepped for the new material to be installed. Once the seats are covered, the process is repeated for the other portions of the vehicle’s interior, such as door cards and the new dashboard. The same pattern and stitch design are sometimes applied to the vehicle’s door cards, center console, or dashboard, so Angel handles executing the Defender re-upholstery design with true craftsmanship.

When all of the interior parts are complete, the parts, usually covered, make their way to the cosmetics bay to finally be fitted and installed in the restored Defender. With the carpet fitted, the newly reupholstered parts are installed by the cosmetics bay piece by piece. 

Ready to see our Upholstery Team can bring your custom Defender’s design to life? Get in touch at [email protected]

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