Painting at Home

One lesson i learned in turning the dilapidated runi i stumbled state it has now reached, is that an adventurous deployment of painted effects and finishes is the cheapest, most effective solution to decorating problem given that the ideal solution is usually too expensive to carry out. For instance, all original wide, elgant cornices characteristic of regency interiors had disappeared, except for a battered stretch left in the front hall. it would have been better practice architecturally to restore them because the pro-protions of period rooms depend on such details, but the cost was prohibitive so I was obliged to try and achieve a similar visual balancing act by other means. Painted or stencilled friezes, painted lines and stencilled borders in contrasting colours help to restore the balance as well as making a decorative point in their own right. I am just beginning to realize, however, after seeing some of the latest developments in painted and decorated ceilings, that for this ruse to work fully, the painted treatment needs to be extended over the ceiling aas well.

The house was a near derelict shell when l bought it; ghetto-like poverty over took spital-fields when the silk-weaving industry collapsed in the early nineteenth century. My reason for buying it was the most persuasive one possible. I was homeless, had next to no money, and it was available, central and cheap. Even so, by the time it had been re-roofed, the windows re-made, ground floors replaced, and the back extension completely rebuilt, there was a large hole in my bank account. On the advice of friends with experience of rehabilitating ‘squats’ , my young daughters and i began by colonizing the top floor. The moment any cash came my way, i put it towards reclaiming the cold, empty, desolete rooms below, employing tradesmen to do the skilled work, like plastering, while i, and such skilled and unskilled helpers as i could recruit, worked at those time-consuming jobs that are feasible for amateurs: burning-of thick crusts of old paint on the woodwork, pulling out nails, patching holes, sanding,filling, scraping, priming and painting.

The Great Illusionists

The great surprice of the current decorative painting revival has been the demand for large-scale murals and trompe i’oeil effects. suddenly the wall-as-picture has become an international status symbol, and painters specializing in this area of the decorative arts find themselves summoned, like djinns, to paint jungle scenery round swimming pools in aldershot, classical ruins on palace walls in dubai, garlanded goddesses on ceilings are re-discovering is that skilful painting can supply whatever element seems lacking in their surrounding. most coveted, it seems, is look of romantic, patrician decay; the newer the penthouse, themore gently crumbling the painted ‘rustication’ , complate with moss, cracks, lizards and carved escutcheons, defaced by time.

Wonderful Living Room Furnitures Custom House Plans Interior Design

John fowler always recommended, and i endorse this, that you sould never do anyting to a new place till you have lived in it or six months. In that way you discover things not immediately apparent, but important for interligent redecorating: how the light falls, which rooms are sunlit and at what time, how the layout of the building works or fails to work, and what arrangements of furniture are possible. Yes enyone who has lived on a building site knows how passionately one craves an oasis of order . Colours instead of endless plaster dust, texturesand the illusion, at least, of a proper room. The moment the plaster had dried (and sometimes before, which has led to an unpremeditated ‘old palazzo’ look on the walls downtairs), i rushed in with my paint and my ideas about colour. Shold anyone wonder how far i follow my own precepts, let me say that there is not a square foot of the building, except  perhaps for a ceiling or two, that has not its paint-work teased about in some way or other.

It is not that i cannot let well alone, but that i keep trying to make ‘well’ better. I belong to the ‘organic’ school of decorators, who insistthe rooms and colour schemes should be allowed to grow. I find blueprint rooms, where averything has been planned on the drawing-board, unsympathetic, and as uncomfortable and constricting as clothes that are too tight. I find certain colours strongly suggest themselves for particular rooms after a while but the great usefulness of pain allow you to have second and third thoughts even after the colour is on the walls, if the result is not what you want – unlike wallpaper. The thundery blue which i tinted down with ultramarine stainer. On the walls, however, as often happens, the colour which looked so pretty over a small area misbehaved and looked oppressively dark, its matt surface sucking inevery ray of light. Sponging over a paler version of the original colour, lightened with white, was helpful, as was shining-up blue painted woodwork with varnish, but the saving grace of the room proved to be the wide frieze (a pattern bed cover) painted round the room just beneath the ceiling in warm peachycolours. Blue curtains overloaded the colour yet again, so i stepped up the stecil with a second band of colours, a fat red and yellow rope, underlining the first.

Paintable at Home

Ian cairnie,one the more imaginatif trompe l’oeil artists, admits that he goes to pieces if he is not given a stylistic framework. He can paint a brilliant pastiche of a claude lorraine landscape or a dutch flower painting in a few days. But, in his words, if you asked me to paint something in my knowing where to begin. I need to be given a style in which to paint.

Many decorative painters admit to fantasies about how they would like their own homes to look, but this transformation rarely takes place. Lack of time is one excuse. Then there is the curse of sheer perfectionist, which comes of producing work to the highest standards in luxurious and beautiful surroundings, i’m such a perfectionist, says stenciller mary maccarthy, the owner of a small, pretty cottage in norfolk, that everything has to be exactly right or i can’t live with it. So i look at blank walls and tell myself how wonderful it will be when i finally get round to it.

Like mary maccarthy, i find it hard not to give a guilty start and become apologrtic when i am asked if my house is covered from top to toe ‘with all those wonderful painted finises you write about’. Seeing, analysing, and writing about so much excellent decorative work makes it easy to become over-critical, and to mindful of all the shortcomings (unfinished areas, ideas that need further development) to take in the overall effect of your own home. But, when i suddenly see my place with new eyes, i realize all over again that it has a special atmosphere, a look of its own, and that this is due more than anyting else to colour and pattern achieved with paint.