A Vintage Pine Table in Emerald

And another pretty table to finish the day up. I finished this piece custom for a client. It had not been sealed originally and so the tabletop had gotten a bit beat up over the years. I sanded the table and the two leaves, stained them darker, and sealed the whole lot glossy smooth. I painted the legs and apron in a custom mixed emerald green with just a bit of blue to it. I distressed it a bit and then sealed it with dark wax.

A Vintage Mahogany Table

Mostly what I do is paint furniture. And I love painted furniture, but it's always a nice break to work on a piece that can be mostly wood, not paint. I picked this sweet vintage c.1940 mahogany table up  on a house call a couple weeks ago. It have delightfully ornate fluted legs, but the real star of the show is the top, which was dinged and watermarked when I got it. I sanded the entire top, stained it, and sealed it. Just look at that glorious graining. I painted the base in a soft shade of eucalyptus to play well against the red tones of the mahogany. It's a drop leaf so it could be used in about a thousand different ways.

A Maple Ethan Allen Hutch in Blue and Cream

I'm sorry, I know I've been showing you a lot of hutches lately. Don't worry though I'll have two dining tables and a kitchen island to show you shortly, to cleanse the palette.
      This superb vintage Ethan Allen solid maple hutch was give to me in trade for delivering, believe it or not, another hutch. Being Ethan Allen, is wonderfully built, but definitely had a bit of a dated feel to it. I refinished the maple top to liven it up, and painted the case in a custom blue called 'Blue Bird', and the interior in a custom deep cream called 'Praline'. I distressed all the painted surfaces and then waxed them. Finally, I replaced the underwhelming brass knobs with faceted glass ones for just a hint of sparkle. I staged it with a group of antique transferware I purchased at an antique shop in Glastonbury this week.

The Gardener's Hutch

Happy March! Happy Spring! I know it's not officially calendar spring yet, but it certainly feels like spring. It's another beautiful day here in East Hampton. The local nursery has just put their pansies out for sale (!!!!!!) and when I went running yesterday I spotted crocus and snowdrops blooming all over the place. An early spring is the best kind of spring, and so in celebration of this month coming in like a lamb, I've staged this hutch in full gardener's kit. I'm a mediocre gardener on my best days, and yet I seem to have a surprising amount of gardening accoutrement scattered about.

       The hutch is solid maple, made by the Virginia Craftsmen, a guild of skilled craftsmen who started building high end reproduction early American furniture in 1927. They're still in business today! I think this hutch is a fairly early example, maybe from the 30s or 40s as it already has quite a bit of oxidation on the exposed wood, and certainly was quite travel worn when it came into my possession. I really really wanted to keep this one for myself. It's so special and unique. Sadly it's massive and I don't have a single damn wall in my damn house where it could fit. So then I thought maybe I should just go ahead and buy a second house just so I could keep it. I refinished the top and painted the case in a custom mixed cream called 'Buttermilk Biscuit'. It's got just a hair of yellow to it, just enough to give it body, but definitely leans more towards wheat. The interior and backboard are in a stark fresh white for contrast.

A Dresser Rescue Mission

"Any Hope?"

That's the title to an email I received just over a week ago from a potential new client. Within she described an antique dresser that had come along with their house, and had sat untouched in their basement for the last 24 years. Keeping a dresser in a damp basement is like trying to grow lily pads in the Sahara. But it happens. The dresser part, that is. Actually perhaps the lily pads too. There are oasis after all. Is oasis the plural to oasis? But I digress.

Here are a couple of the pictures that accompanied the email- 

Eeeeeek. There might be hope for the poor thing, but it was going to take some serious elbow work to find it, and then quite a bit of scrubbing and sanding from there.

And yet...I could tell that the piece was antique, likely from about 1890-1910, and certainly had a lovely form, long and lean, with that sweet little shell carved in the base. I could see it was solid wood, chestnut with pine secondary wood I believe, and thank goodness for that. A veneer piece would have been in shambles after that long in the basement. Er... more in shambles at least. This dresser was pretty shamble-y.

Finally the client seemed very very nice, and that goes a long way for me. Sometimes I get the sassiest emails, which I promptly ignore. No piece of furniture is worth working for an obnoxious ninny. But on the other hand, I'm willing to do a great deal of work to help a kind person rescue an antique dresser. So with all that in mind, I said yes. There was hope (I hoped). 

When the clients unloaded the piece I worried I had been wrong. Though the case was nice a sturdy, surprisingly so, every single drawer was falling apart and there's nothing I hate more than working on drawers. The pine secondary wood had not withstood the damp as well as the far denser chestnut. But what was even worse and isn't really clear in any of the before pictures, was that the piece had been very very badly refinished at some time previous. Had it just been painted an ugly color, my work would have been easier, in fact that paint layer would have further protected it from the basement elements. But no, this had been scraped. And allow me to just cast a little side eye at all the wood enthusiasts out there who think refinishing furniture back to wood is so SO much better for the integrity of an antique. It's not. In the process of removing the old surface, some dummy had gouged the case badly, over and over and over again. Grrrrrrr.

But that's ok. She's turned out just dandy in the end. I rebuilt every single drawer, gluing all the loose dovetails, fixing all the warps and cracks in the drawer bottoms, sanding the sides smooth, and waxing them so they run nicely once more. I added drawer stops where they'd fallen off, and replaced the escutcheon plates, which had also been lost over the last hundred years. I recolored the original hardware and the escutcheon plates to match. I sanded the top for hours HOURS to get all the gouges from the bad refinish out, and filled two giant shrinkage cracks in the side panels. I also filled as much of the gouges in the case as I could manage, and then sanded all the surfaces to prep for paint. The client selected a soft blue that I just love with the brighter hardware and the rich luster of the top. This dresser was definitely a challenge, but the end result makes it all worth it.