only rodgers menzies could get away with handing me a gallon-size ziplock bag full of chipped paint and saying, “here you go, nancy drew!”  as you know, one does not turn down a request from the lovely mr. m., and so i packed up my glazing medium, tints, and brushes, and went to one of the most fabulous old homes in memphis to do a little detective work.

one of the dining room walls had been damaged by water, and our lovely client wanted to replicate the existing fantasy-glazed finish.  rodgers knew the base coat: benjamin moore’s dijon, #193.  working to develop the glazes from the chips of the old finish, and guided by the pattern on the current walls, i did my best.

here is a corner, before (and please excuse the color cast in this image – yikes!):

and after:

here are some other views:

not mrs. jones’s usual bag, but a very fun challenge, and for truly one of the nicest, funniest, most considerate people i’ve ever worked for.  oh, and lovely she has these fab old dining room chairs…here’s a detail of the finish:

it’s not all put back together yet, but here is a sneak-peek of a “groovy” (my lovely client’s word) china cabinet – a must-use bequest from her mother-in-law.  despite its grooviness, the piece is very practical, and has pretty lines and is the right scale for their dining room.  not to mention the whole mother-in-law angle.   anna baskin lattimore wisely suggested a high-gloss paint job as a fix.  here it is before:

and after:

edgecomb gray (benjamin moore’s #hc.173) is on the inside, and diplomat gray (pratt & lambert’s #33.21) on the outside, both mixed in hollandlac brilliant, with thanks as always to the wonderful emmett fiore for his expertise.

(we will have a final “after” very soon, once the shelves are back in and arranged, promise.)

here is a snippet of the fab chair fabric in the foreground:

this pair of chairs – one more project for lovely clients of anna baskin lattimore’s – began their journey to memphis as an ebay purchase.  a series of delivery nightmares ensued, and upon arrival not only were they broken, they were sort of disappointingly bland…a reproduction walnutty kind of finish, they deserved much better.  (to add to the trouble – there is not a “before” to show you!  but you can imagine…very plain…not quite just right.)  here are some process shots:

after having them repaired, anna specified benjamin moore’s natural linen (#966) as a base coat.  (it was the first time i’ve used advance – how can a waterborne paint also be an alkyd?  apparently it can!  it is a wonderful finish, much like their impervo, which was hitherto my go-to enamel.  mrs. jones no longer doubts.  they’ve blinded me with their science.)   gold-leaf-toned gilding wax highlights the pretty curly-ribbon backs, with two layers of glaze, tinted raw umber and gray, on top.

and here they are, with new upholstered seats, finally at home:

{props to our super-lovely clients’ team: anna baskin lattimore (designer), doug enoch (architect), and frank herdzina (builder)…i have thoroughly enjoyed working in this gorgeous home over the past few months.}

here is a pair of recent projects, both armoires (or clothes-presses, or chifforobes, or wardrobes…please choose your favorite terminology)(but not a favorite piece – i hope you will like them equally well!) and both done in shades of white, but that is where the similarities end.  so, here we go with a little compare and contrast exercise.

my lovely client wanted hers, a pretty reproduction pine press, to be very soft and antiqued.  here is a before and in-the-works (including her inspiration shot):

this was a perfect opportunity to break out some of my new annie sloan chalk paint.  after a light sanding and cleaning (we removed the old wax and sanding dust with citrus solvent), two coats of annie’s old white were applied, followed by her waxes – clear and then tinted.  the chalk paint goes on beautifully without priming, even over the knots, and leaves some yummy texture.   a little buffing, and it’s done (though not re-assembled or in its new spot yet):

this second one is a vintage mahogany chifforobe, that, though cracked, still has plenty of distinguished service to offer.  it is for mrs. jones’s own bathroom…one of the first pieces we bought as newlyweds.  found at a local junque shop, it was missing its mirror, which i replaced with brass chicken wire.  it has been in a bedroom (with gathered fabric behind the wire) hiding all kinds of things for years.  before:

early in our bathroom renovation brainstorming, selena pulled a tear sheet of a vintage-era bathroom furnished with a fancy chest-on-chest dresser that had been painted in high-gloss white.  in translating the look to our project, she immediately zeroed in on the armoire as a candidate for re-doing.  perfect size, perfect storage…brilliant!  i called emmett fiore, and he sent some hollandlac tinted to benjamin moore’s glacier white (# oc.37) on the next ups truck.   after sanding the surface lightly and wiping it down with a tack cloth (but leaving the crackled varnish alone), i used enamel undercoat followed by two coats of the lac.  here is the after, and some details:

i love the effect the glossy white has on the old varnish underneath – kind of mock croc.

the old wire locker baskets (now holding soap and washcloths) are from one of my favorite etsy shops, haven vintage.

still to come:  all the deets on the new bathroom & laundry room…but here at least you can see one the fab thomas o’brien sconces that selena chose, along with the flooring and subway tile she tracked down for us.  her (genius!)  idea to mirror the long wall opened things up in a dramatic way.

another week, another fun project for anna baskin lattimore’s lovely clients.  their beautful home (by architect doug enoch) features a kitchen with an incredible onyx tile backsplash and custom, curvy range hood.   after painting the kitchen’s walls a deeper color, anna and her client decided that the hood should have a little more visual heft and detail, and tie in with the tile a bit more. 

here is the before:

we decided to add some texture with a hand-troweled plaster (bella vernici’s serico).  then, color in a blue/gray (benjamin moore’s winter solstice, #1605) and two layers of charcoal-y and raw umber glaze were rubbed on.  finally, modern masters’ dead flat varnish was applied to make it wipe-clean-able and to give a matte finish.  here is the after, and a detail:

a lovely client (of lovely local designer lindley martens) had inherited this sturdy, pretty set of stickley dining chairs from her parents.  the tired-looking cherry finish had worn away in spots, and so she had a decision to make:

1. leave the chairs in the attic (where they would be subject to punishing heat and humidity, and not see the light of day – bad choice)

2. have them refinished to the original cherry (which she was completely over – so also, not a good choice)

3. have them snazzed up with paint in a fresh color, and use them in her pretty breakfast room

she and lindley chose option 3.  sporting their new hue (pratt & lambert’s anubis, #32.17) with a coat of paste wax to protect them and soften the look a bit, they are ready to go.  and go they will, over the river (literally, the mississippi) and through some woods, to their beautiful new home.  hopefully, lindley will bring back some good photos for me to share with you.  

with due respect, i took pains to preserve the original stickley labels, as well as the price tags (still on two) that revealed their purchase at the beloved old goldsmith’s department store in downtown memphis.

here they are, before and after:

excuse me now as i brace myself for a category-3 level stickley furniture-fan backlash.

here is another project for the same lovely client of anna baskin lattimore’s (keep reading for details on some sconces, and a bathroom vanity, with two more projects yet to come!)…to add a little something extra to their already-beautiful dining room, anna designed a ceiling treatment that was my pleasure to execute.  here is the room, before:

after applying a wash (made with modern masters’ pharoah’s gold mixed into plenty of glazing medium and extender)…

…over the base coat of benjamin moore’s quiet moments (#1563)…

…i applied a pattern working its way along the edges of the ceiling.  anna and i chose a few elements from stencil library’s chinese tree set, combined to echo the embroidered bamboo design in the gorgeous silk curtains.

modern masters’ rich gold was the perfect color for the stenciling…a little sheer, a little sheen.

if you would like to see one of my all-time favorite teachers, the incredible stencil designer helen morris, in action, watch this! details on her new book, stencil it, are coming soon.  in case you are not familiar with helen, she is the creative force behind the venerable stencil library.  her blog is one of my favorite places to go for inspiration.

isn’t that what we girls (pre-spanx, when we used to wear slips)(and yes, mrs. jones is that old) would say to each other to signal that lingerie was showing?  or was it “snowing in florida”?  it has been so long since an actual slip was part of our deshabille, i can’t remember.  it was no slip, however, that my talented friend, designer anna baskin lattimore, and her lovely client chose this wonderful old wash-stand to transform into a bathroom vanity:

the only difficulty was that the old paint was not cooperating with the new plan, and so they asked me to help fix it.  here is a before (with apologies for the bad flash/lighting):

i took a drawer to seabrook, where their resident paint-matching genius, denise, nailed down the color on her first try: benjamin moore’s paris rain, #1501.  (she is the best!)  after sanding back the peeling areas, i stippled in the fresh paint, and then coated the whole piece with low-luster varnish and finally paste wax to protect it from further damage and to retain its old furniture feel.  a little tinted mylands was rubbed into the newly finished areas to give a bit of patina and bring the whole thing back together.  after:

a pretty pair of sconces fell into my lucky, lovely client’s lap.   they were, however, in need of a tone tweak, being a little too cool and silver for her warm, yummy dining room…especially up against the gilded trim on her gorgeous antique chandelier.  a little rub & buff (lots of gold leaf, mixed with a bit of silver leaf), topped with raw-umber-tinted glaze to age them a little, did the trick:

this set of chairs came from a lovely clients’ mother’s home.  she (lucky!) is working with rodgers menzies to fab-u-lize her new house.   mr. menzies will modestly deny this, but he is (along with jimmy graham and william r. eubanks) one of the reigning elder statesmen of the memphis design community.   it was a total thrill to have him drop by and tweak the chairs as the process went along…as we tinted glazes together, he regaled mrs. jones with tales of painting and working out finishes with his friend joe niermann (in pre-niermann weeks days, when he lived in memphis, too.)  such a treat!

anyway, here is one of the chairs, before:

since the concept was to work with the original paint, job one was to cover the blue-painted medallions…it was a bit of a challenge to match the color (since it had faded to several shades of cream over time) and because this particular blue was disinclined to disappear.  since there were 14 spots on each chair that had been picked out in blue…well, you can imagine.  one other process note: for adehesion and durability (the existing finish being an oil-based enamel) i used an oil-based glazing medium.

now, getting to the after…the request being a glazed finish over the existing paint with a lot of “yummy”.  my first pass was apparently just not quite something enough…

…rodgers said (as only he could) ” honey, they are just too pristine.” he  instructed me to “dirty them up…just let it fly!”.  what do you say to something like that?  he’s the boss, applesauce.

originally, mr. m asked for a red harlequin pattern – fading in and out – for the caned backs, using pratt & lambert’s pagoda red, #5.15 (what he characterizes as a “good, old, dirty red”.)  after seeing them in the works, he decided that the pattern needed “strengthening”, and so, with a roll of my 1/4″ tape, he blocked out a new pattern for me to paint on top of the first…creating a sort-of argyle.

after that, i laid on layers of glazes – first tinted with raw umber, then grayed up with lamp black – brushed on, softened up with cheesecloth, and spattered (using an old toothbrush):

and now here they are, in their beautiful new home, with fabulously plump paisley cushions:

here is a pair of before and afters done recently for a lovely client and her precious daughter.   she had the desk made for ellie, a budding artist, who is in the process of big-girl-ifying her bedroom.  the small side table (one of a pair) was a brilliant find my client made at a local junque shop.  both mother and daughter were after a little gloss and glam for their pieces.

for ellie’s desk – a little worried about those knots showing through – i primed with zissner’s stain-blocking primer, smoothed out the cracks and gaps (but let the grain still show) with wood filler, and then sealed the bottom, inside of the drawer, and all other unseen surfaces with clear polyurethane.  (it’s key to do this on a new piece – to seal every surface – to ensure that some parts don’t absorb more moisture from humidity than others, causing warping and/or cracking.)  after base-coating with modern masters’ silver, i topped it with a high-gloss polyurethane…ellie can now createcreatecreate, and her desk can be scrubbed clean.  she chose a pull from my grab-bag of hardware: a sparkly, rhinestone-studded number from anthropologie, to complete the look.

my client was looking for a way to add a bit of shine and light to her beautiful living room, which is full of soft, deep colors and surfaces.  she earned a gold star on her chart by researching and choosing a color…i love a delightfully decisive client who shows up with her own sample pot!  the bottom of the table was stamped and marked:

does anyone know how to interpret?  anyway, to get the gloss she wanted, i called emmett fiore at fine paints of europe.  he (obligingly, of course…he is not my crush for nothing, you know) mixed some hollandlac brilliant in her choice of behr’s cornerstone 330e.2.  after cleaning and sanding the curvy little table and doing a little repair to the filleting around the top…

…i primed it with fpe’s enamel underbody and then applied two coats of the paint.  she asked for a tiny bit of gilding wax rubbed on to some of the edges as a finishing touch.

as i was working, the combination kept reminding me of something…i finally realized it is our (old paris 2nd empire?) china, collected and given to us by my lovely mother-in-law, the original mrs. jones.

though mrs. jones (preferring paint) as a rule does not refinish furniture, this gorgeous old chair from an especially lovely client’s mother’s home (with lovely rodgers menzies as the designer) was an exception.  it had been damaged (heat? water? mila kunis?) and just needed a little love to make a comeback.   challenge #1 was to match the color of the stain.  (option b would have been to strip the varnish from entire chair, and then and re-stain it with a new color…but that would have been risky, since adding more stain to the existing tone might have just darkened those areas further.  and imagine, just for a second, stripping the topcoat from a double-caned piece like this…little tiny brushes are involved, and lots of patience.  more than mrs. jones possesses.)  and so, after a good sanding, i pulled out all my cans, and the mixing began.

for those taking notes, minwax‘s puritan pine with just a dash of honey maple came closest.  hickory worked well for some fly-specking and adding the shading that the old finish had here and there.

here is the chair, before:

places that retain the old varnish don’t absorb the stain, so, after applying a pre-stain wood conditioner to ensure even-ness, i went over the piece several times with a medium-sized filbert brush and laid in the spots that needed color, building up to match the existing finish.  after the honey/pine cocktail and a final sanding, it was time to add the fly-specks (spattered on with an old toothbrush) and then to use a little thinned out stain (hickory) as a glaze in some spots.

since rattan does not absorb stain or glaze the same way that wood does, those little spots in the caning took some extra passes, but eventually blended in fairly well.  after three coats of varnish – just to make sure – it is ready to stay in the family for a long time.

the happiest moment of the delivery was when i mentioned the carved swans, and my lovely client and her daughter both exclaimed, “there are swans?”  yes, and they are back.

finally, here is the chair – sporting a fancy cushion – in its new home: