A Pine Side Table in Eggplant

I paint of lot of furniture in blue, green, yellow, black, white, and gray. Those are the colors that sell, those are the colors that get requested. So you can imagine just how excited I am when I get a color request anywhere outside that set. The weirder the better. I like color. I like all color, and good gravy, sometimes I get sick of painting things white.

         I snagged this sweet little vintage solid pine side table from the ReStore last week. It's made by the Bennington Pine Furniture Company, probably right around 1970. Bennington Pine is easily one of my favorite 20th century furniture manufacturers, right up there with Ethan Allen, Heywood Wakefield, Drexel, and White in terms of quality and excellence in design. Bennington built things beautifully, they didn't cut corners, and thusly their pieces are still very much usable and relevant today. But oh that sticky dark old stain that just screams "grandma's house"so hard it practically baked me a pie and asked why I haven't started having kids yet. That stain had to go.

           A client I had the pleasure to work with last winter approached me to refinish the piece custom for her. She had a vision for it, an excellent vision. A dark deep eggplant, not purple, not black, but with a lot of presence and gusto. Now that's the kind of color I can get behind! We went with a medium stain for the pine top, and I mixed up a batch of this awesome brand new hue, which I've named "Spellbound". I'm rather in love with it, to be honest.