In the slow seat: A faux tortoiseshell finish chair re-do

For a large project I've been working on, I needed a chair to fill an empty space under astaircase. The chair needed to be small, graphic, Frenchy, formal (but not too formal) and well-priced. Oh, and I needed it yesterday. Well, luck struck twice at my favorite hotel liquidator. In addition to the great celadon crackle lamp, I scored this chair: A little battered, showing a little wear with the years (not unlike myself), but with good lines and lots of potential. Since the chair would be against light neutral walls, I wanted a darkish finish, but one that would blend with the client's existing small French burl wood bookcase. "Eureka", I shrieked, (Not really- well, maybe a little, but only on the inside), "I'll do a faux tortoiseshell finish."_I've been wanting to try it, but the opportunity had not yet presented itself. As you look through the following photos, you'll notice I did not remove the seat. That is only because I couldn't yet it out with unscrewing the chair and taking it apart. I've been done that road before, and it was a long and winding one with only a moderately happy conclusion, so since I was planning to reupholster the seat anyway, I just left it on. I first cleaned and sanded the chair. Faux tortoise shell calls for a medium yellow/tan basecoat, and since the existing finish was this color, I used it as my basecoast. Otherwise, I would have primed and painted. Next step, apply an ochre glaze. I used all oil paint and oil based products, and after doing this technique, I think they're crucial. I think latex would dry way too quickly and would not have the necessary "flow." For my ochre glaze, I used minwax's olde maple polyshade in satin. It's a mix of stain and polyurethane. It was the right color, I had it already, and I wanted a finished product that was quick glossy, so it worked well. Smooth on a light coat. (don't worry, I corrected the drips you see in the photos.):

While it's still wet (you have to work in sections: if you do each step to the whole chair, it'll dry too much), with a small brush apply a medium to dark brown paint in a diagonal checkerboard:

Then fill in some of the spaces with black paint in the same manner while the glaze and brown paint are still wet. Next, use a large, soft, dry brush to gently smooth the spots together. If you need to, blot occasionally with a crumpled cloth to lift paint or to blend.

Let dry. At that point, your object should look something like this: (i.e. a leopard with leporasy)

Now it's time to further blend the layers and add some translucence. I applied a series of tinted polyurethanes to blend the colors and add shine. First: Benjamin Moore's Colonial Maple:

If I had wanted a lighter finish, I would have applied mulitple layers of the maple. Since I wanted a darker finish; however, I next applied dark walnut.

If I had more time, I would have applied one more layer of dark walnut. After it dried overnight, I reupholstered the seat in a great cotton print. It's an almost zebra in aqua and white. I used a cotton to keep the chair from feeling too tight assed.

The finished result (the upholstery job is not perfect: it was hard to do with taking the cushion completely off):

Sunny side up: How to choose the perfect yellow paint color

I've just recently discovered the joy of google analytics, and after the thrill of realizing that I had the occasional reader other than immediate family (not that you don't rule p. lee and barbara), I learned how to figure out what key word searches led the occasional reader to come drink deeply at this fount of knowledge (since you can't always determine tone from prose, much like a heavily boxtoxed person can't always display emotion--not that I know personally, mind you--I assure you I'm joking when I refer to myself as a fount of knowledge--kind of.) One reader came trying to determine the right color yellow to paint her kitchen. In my experience, yellow is a very difficult color to get right. As you might imagine, light sources play even more importance in how it looks than other paint colors--natural sunlight and incandescent lighting can both turn what seems the palest, most innocent butter into a screaming citrus acid trip. Of course, used well, yellow can be a wonderfully versatile color: a saturated tone used with black and white or bold color can be very modern; a combined with crisp white and blue, it becomes classic cottage, and muted and dull or laquared, it becomes a classic to use with important art and antiques. So here goes: what I've learned about picking yellow paint.

1. It's very hard to live with pure yellow, even in a pale version. Unless you really, really love yellow, it becomes overpowering, so most yellow paints are a mixture of yellows and other pigments. Since yellow is between orange and green on the color will, most yellows will lean toward one of those hues. In the pic below, the yellow has orange undertones. Two quick tips for determining undertones: If you compare the sample next to pure white, it's easier to detect them. Tip 2: if you are looking at a paint strip, look at the most intense, darkest color at the bottom. It's often easier to detect undertones in darker colors.
A green toned yellow. (sorry the pic is so small...technology and I are not quite on a first name basis yet:

2. Test, TEST, TEST. I mentioned in an earlier post the important of testing color. With yellow it is crucial that you test it, both in sunlight and in your night lighting. I once painted a bedroom in Benjamin Moore's Beacon Hill (without testing, just so others could learn from my pain without enduring it themselves). By daylight, it was the most beautiful pale, yellow/green citrus. At night, under incandescent lighting it was a chartruese horror so awful that it drove me into a neutral phase that lasted for years.

3. As a general rule, yellow is so intense that you should go lighter than you think. If you love a color in the middle of the paint strip, I'd start by testing at least one shade lighter, and probably two. Below is designer Jamie Drake's famous chrome yellow bedroom. I guarantee you, that if you saw a similar color on a swatch, it would look like a sweet, cheerful butter.



4. Don't discount muted yellows, golds, and golden kakhis. Since light picks up yellow undertones so easily, I actually use more complex and muted golds when clients tell me they want "yellow." When I initially show them the swatches, they often think the colors look too muted, kakhi, and drab, but are always surprised when large test swatches turn into gold and yellow before their eyes. If you open a paint fan deck, it's usually broken into two basic areas---the purer, brighter colors are grouped together, and the more neutral, complex colors are together. Without getting too technical, complex colors are colors that are made of many pigments...they tend to be the ones that are hard to define: i.e., in the case of yellow, it may change when the room's lighting changes to cream, to butter, or to pale banana over the course of the day. These are typically the easiest colors to live with because they offer more change and versatility. Thus, when looking for yellow, I urge you to try out some colors that may seem too dull or kakhi--you will be very surprised. Of these, my picks are Benjamin Moore's Powell Buff, Dunmoore Cream, Chesterton Buff, Montgomery White, and Sherwin William's Blonde, Convivial Yellow.

Below, Julia Reed's New York Living room done in a muted golden yellow.

Two of the 20th century's most famous yellow rooms: Babe Paley's living room:

Nancy Lancaster's "buttah" yellow drawing room. Neither rooms' yellows are simple: Both are the result of mutliple tones and layers (that means they were expensive to achieve). Read the article at StyleCourt.

Sherwin William's Blonde in my own living room 5. Never, never, never pick your yellow from a magazine photo without testing. Even if they give the exact color, photos distort wall color. What seems pale in a photo taken with a flash and then photoshopped, may actually be very vibrant in person.

6. A few facts about yellow from psychology.about.com:

The Color Psychology of Yellow
Yellow is a bright that is often described as cheery and warm.
Yellow is also the most fatiguing to the eye due to the high amount of light that is reflected. Using yellow as a background on paper or computer monitors can lead to eyestrain or vision loss in extreme cases.
Yellow can also create feelings of frustration and anger. While it is considered a cheerful color, people are more likely to lose their tempers in yellow rooms and babies tend to cry more in yellow rooms.
Yellow can also increase the metabolism.
Since yellow is the most visible color, it is also the most attention-getting color. Yellow can be used in small amount to draw notice, such as on traffic sign or advertisements.

Top 2 photos from Domino Magazine website. Jamie Drake's bedroom. Photos of Julia Reed, Babe Paley, and Nancy Lancaster's room from Stylecourt blog.

Let there be light: A before and after lamp redo.

I'll start this post with a caveat: If you like clean, modern, comtemporary, and sleek you will not enjoy the following redo. If you like things that are over the top with just a smidge of too much a the tiniest touch of tacky, you might like it. As Diana Vreeland said, "I'm not against bad taste. I'm against no taste." Or as I put it, "If you never go over the top, you'll never get to see what's on the other side.
Let's start with my problem: an empty console table in the hallway of a client's mostly traditional home. The console table itself is formal, a vintage, possibly even late 19th century gold leafed rococo revival piece (Note: I did not choose the piece. It was from a former residence). It needed lighting, but I did not want to use a pair of buffet lamps for a couple of reasons. 1. The hall is primarily neutral and the table is set against a mirrored wall (Note: the mirrored wall was selected by the previous owner and their architect). My clients were against the idea of hanging another mirror or art in front of the existing mirror, so I needed a large lamp that made a major statement. 2. The house and hall already contains a lot of pairs: pairs of chairs, pairs of lamps, pairs of prints and painting, etc. 3. Those incredibly ugly words: budgetary constraints.
Enter: this tall celadon beauty found for just $10 dollars at a hotel liquidators. It's tall-I didn't measure, but at least 36", and the body was in perfect shape and the perfect shade of blue green to accent all of the cool blue shades the wife loves. It's not apparent in the pictures, but the body has a beautiful crackle finish.

The makeover supplies: harps, finials, and ecru silk lamp shades for Lowes, Modern Masters metallic paint, and the most beautiful trim from Interior Fabrics (also available online here). In an ideal world, I would have had a large oval custom lamp shade made, but: 1. the party is Sat. night 2. If I could have fit a $200-300 lampshade in to the budget, I wouldn't have been looking for lamps at a hotel liquidators.

I agree with I Suwannee here that brass is the new silver, so I didn't mind the shiny brass finish, especially since the house retains much of its shiny brass hardware from the 1980s, and the console table is goldleafed. However, the finish had a few small blemishes, so I lightly dabbed it with a gold metallic paint to hide the blemishes and give the finish a slightly crazed look. I'll bet you're thinking, I didn't know paint would adhere well to brass. Guess what, you're right, it won't, and I wouldn't paint hardware, drawer pulls, etc. that would be used on a regular basis. But for something that will rarely be touched, it will hold up fine.

Next I glued a gimp brad in shades of gold, celadon, and raspberry (an accent color throughout the downstairs) to the top of each of the shades. I used hot glue.

Next, I glued a coordinating tassel trim to the bottom of the shades, trying to finish off the ends neatly. I really hate doing anything like this that requires precision.

Then, the new harps and finials, a little accessorizing the homeowners' things and voila:

A lamp that makes a statement. I'm not really sure what all that statement entails ,but in part, it saying " Look at me. "

Decorating overload

Luckily I'm the midst of an installation, getting a client ready for a dinner party on Sat. That means on Sunday I can promise you lots of pics of a very interesting house designed in the 1980s by a prominent New Orleans architect, August Perez. I've shared a few glimpses of the music room:

Here's a sneak peak at the dining room. The next time you see it, I promise not only will there not be debris spread across the table, it will be properly dressed.

So, if you're interested come back Sunday for a house tour, and I'll take you step by step through the decorating process. And it has been a long and winding process, I can tell you: 4 children under 10, furniture from 2 prior residences, wildly divergent tastes between husband and wife (he never met a heavily gilded empire piece that he didn't covet and loves the color combo of red and gold--she adores painted furniture and that whole shabby chic meets sweden meets country french look--it's like trying to decorate a house for Krystal Carrington and Alexis Morrell Carrington Colby Dexter Dexter Rowan. Thank God, there's no fish pond), a kitchen with no direct sunlight, massive strucural issues and a foyer/center hall/atrium configuration that more closely resembles that found in a hotel than a family home.

I swear it didn't look like that on the swatch: How to avoid the most common mistakes when choosing paint

A couple of posts ago, I shared one of my paint selection disasters with you. It certainly wasn't the first, and, sadly, I doubt it will be my last. However, after working in design for the past 10 or so years (God, I'm getting old), I've learned a lot about picking paint for both myself and clients, and the mistakes are much fewer and farther between. I've decided to share with you what I have found to be the most common mistakes people make when picking paint, and how to avoid them. You're so lucky; I usually charge for this information. However, this time I'll consider it my contribution to the stimulus package.

Most common mistakes:

1. Picking the paint color to early. It's perfectly fine to go into a design project with a general color idea: I want a red dining room; I want a yellow kitchen; etc. However, you need to leave off picking the exact shade until you've selected whatever is the most difficult to co-ordinate part of the project. Depending on the room, that can be drapery or upholstery fabric, tiles, flooring, countertops, rugs, art, etc. Here's why that hard to find item should be picked first, if at all possible: Suppose you want a yellow kitchen for your 40s bungalow. Additionally, you want to do a backsplash with a yellow and white checkerboard pattern, as well as some vintage inspired yellow floral cafe curtains (yes, I know it all sounds too twee to endure, but I'm just using it as an example...it's not a real room). Any tile store you go to is only going to have a very limited selection of yellow tiles...maybe only one that's appropriate for your application. You'll have more luck finding a floral print with yellow, but even with a large fabric selection, it will be hard to find the right combination of print you like, yellow color that coordinates, fabric type you want, and price that is affordable. The chances of either of those things matching a preselected yellow paint is very slim. This would be an even greater challange when working with a color choice that isn't particularly fashionable, such as cobalt blue or forest green. However, if you pick your yellow tiles first, it's an easy thing to match a yellow paint to them, even if you have to resort to computer matching. So in short, there are thousands of different shades of paint, inluding custom blending and computer matching. There is, however, a limited supply of home furnishings. I used to see it all the time at the furniture store: clients who had just spent thousands of dollars to paint their open floor plan living space only to realize that in the entire store's selection of hundreds of fabric options, they were able to find only a handful of fabrics that co-ordinated with their neutral, supposedly goes with anything paint.

2. Not testing paint or not testing it correctly. There is no way to pick a color from a 2 inch square. Those things lie like a cheating boyfriend. The paint turns out more intense, or darker, or lighter, or bolder, or duller, or greyer, etc. than the chip itself. If you are experienced with picking color in general and the paint color itself, you can form an educated guess about how that 2 inch square will look covering acres of wall, but honestly, it's at best still a guess. The only way to know what a color will really look like is to test it, on several areas and in different lights. And the way to test properly is to buy a quart and paint it on a piece of poster board on which you have left a white border. If you paint it directly onto the wall, the wall color will affect what you see in two ways- by giving an undertone to the paint and by a direct comparison. How a color looks is influenced by other colors next to it. So the only way to judge the new color is by surrounding it with white so no other color directly influences. Skip this step at your own risk, especially in the case of a major paint job.

3. Using a color (without testing) because it looked great at someone else's house. Seeing a paint color at another person's house can actually be a great way to find color inspiration. However, before you use it at your own home, you need to do more analysis. Ask yourselves these kinds of questions:

1. Will I be using the color in a similiar proportion? i.e. That bold pumpkin that brings a small powder room to life could easily be overpowering in a large full guest bath.
2. How similiar are our homes? Are both tradtional with similiar mouldings (large white or cream mouldings have a major impact in calming intense, dramatic, or dark walls)? Are our floor coverings similiar? Do we have similiar furniture? For example, a black dining room in a contempoary house with honed travertine floors, a mirrored table, cream leather chairs, and several large, primarily white abstracts may not feel dark at all. However, the effect will be vastly different if you transfer those ebony walls into a dining room with dark wood floors, a jewel toned Persian rug, and mahogany casegoods.
3. Do the homes have similiar light exposure? Homes with a lot of natural light can handle many more types of color than one with much less light. What looks bright and cheerful when washed with sunlight can quickly become strident, harsh, and garish in a dim space lit with artifical lighting.

4. Forgetting how the color interacts with other rooms. Most rooms do not stand alone. In an open concept floor plan, how colors intersect is a more difficult and problematic issue, but even in traditional spaces, you need to think about how the color of adjoining rooms look together. In addition to the wall colors, you also need to think about how the new color will look with flooring and furnishings in other rooms. They need not match, but should complement each other.

5. Following Trends. Fashions come an go in paint colors, just as in clothes and makeup. Even neutrals change: when I first started in design in the 1990's, most of the beiges we worked with had pink undertones; now, they go green. But when you're picking color for your own home, Number 1: think about what you personally like. No color is bad. If you've always loved hunter green and navy, but have shied away from using them because they're too 80s---ignore the haters and go for it. With the right furnishings and details, even "out" colors can look fresh, modern, and beautiful. Number 2: keep in mind what fixed items you have to work with. It's certainly better to go with a "dated," but beautiful pink toned taupe that flatters your cabinets that can't be replaced, than to go with the latest yellow toned beige that clashes.

Image from my 50s year blog here.

Everybody needs something to hang over their sofa; or art by the inch

Every one has a blank wall that needs a piece of art. It may be over the sofa, in the entry, or over a dining room buffet. Perhaps you've looked, but haven't found the corret combination of size, subject matter, color palette, and price point. Well, you've come to the right place. I can give you art by the inch. All of these pieces were commissioned by clients to fill specific decorating needs. Working with a mixture of media on canvases, I was able to customize each piece for specific sites and color schemes.

I prefer working in abstract reprensentationalism, and have formal training and years of experience.

If you are interested, please view my contact information here. Prices vary by size.

Every great designer needs a support staff

For every great designer, there is a great design staff. I am no different. Allow me to introduce the team that lets my genius shine.

First, there's Damien, my design assistant. Tablescapes are his specialty. He loves to just jump right into a setting and get really hands, I mean, paws on.

He is also tech guy. And, when I get bogged down, I let Damien do a little ghost blogging. Shhhh! It's our little secret.


Next, there's George in the work room. This cat really knows his way around custom window treatments. He's always ready to tear into a new project.

And finally, Ms. Cleopatra Schwartz. Every designer needs a hot secretary/receptionist, and I'm lucky to have one so dedicated. Look at her: so attentive, hanging on every word, taking notes, just incredibly involved in the office. She's also helping me to embrace minimalism. Through her influence, I've discarded rugs, pillows, books, hats, shoes, and socks that really were just cluttering up my life. How did I get so lucky.