An Antique Sideboard in Linen

I just love working with this client. Dirty secret: I have favorites, and she's one of my favorites. She has the prettiest home, so it's always satisfying to see the furniture in such an elegant setting, and she has sweet kids, and an awesome husband, and she's a darling. Plus she has great taste and I always love her vision for the pieces we collaborate on.

             She and I had been keeping our eyes peeled for the perfect sideboard for her dining room for more than a month now when Carl the Furniture Guy found this gorgeous but faded beauty for me a week ago. In the first pictures he sent me it was super underwhelming looking, but I'm so glad we gave it a chance, it's so pretty in person. My client selected a shade of linen for the exterior, and a pop of plum for the interior. We opted to highlight the incised carving with a bright white that I put on with a wee little detail brush. The breathtaking hardware is original to the piece, which probably dates to about 1915. I distressed the case and sealed it with dark wax. The flowers are all from Stop and Shop, and the equestrian print is a $10 flea market find that I'm planning to put in our basement once we finish renovating it to be the "cellar tavern".

           This is my first time using my new camera and I'm pretty happy with it. I can definitely tell the difference and I'm looking forward to experimenting with it to get better. Because honestly I can make the most wonderful furniture in the world, but if I can't take swell pictures of said furniture, it's not much good to you, dear reader.

         Happy Thursday. It's a gorgeous fall day here in Connecticut, cool and clear as a bell with blue BLUE skies. It's been a long week already, so Dr. Kate is prescribing you all a big glass of wine tonight! Take care of yourselves and each other!!

And then I wandered around taking pictures of stuff-

 Here's our guest house/music studio that we built two years ago.

 And the rhododendron at the corner of the house that always turns Christmas colors this time of year.

And Spud the cat who likes to make himself a little nest of leaves and nap in the afternoon sun on the South side of the main house.
  

What is Sacred, What is Not

All day yesterday I struggled to find my voice for this blog. I took a break from my instagram and Heir and Space FB page, and of course from typing away at the blog proper, though I neglect my blog so often I doubt any of you noticed.

             Unless you live in a cave on an island with a smoke monster roommate, you are already aware that something big happened yesterday, something that caused a massive, core-shaking shift in my little country. Now I, being a woman of strong, and to be fair, sometimes irrational levels of passion, have some strong opinions on this matter. Very strong, shouting strong. And if you're that damn curious and don't feel wholly over saturated already, then fine, you can follow me on twitter, which is the only place I ever really take my gloves off and rage bloody knuckles against the world.

            But I want to make you a promise. Unless you go looking for my opinions there, you will not need to see them. I will not be offering up my cutting sarcasm on this particular matter here on my blog, or on the Heir and Space Facebook page, or on my instagram page, the areas that I consider "public" and not so much mine as ours, I'd like to think Heir and Space has becoming something bigger than just me, and my sass. Maybe that's self indulgent, but today I need to indulge a bit.

             At the deepest level, in our country that now stands so incredibly divided, we are all arguing about our rights. Rights to affordable healthcare, rights to freedom of speech, rights to bear arms, rights to equality, rights to assemble, rights to a clean environment, to education, to personal safety, to not being harassed or assaulted for one's race, or religious beliefs, or gender, or sexual orientation. Here at Heir and Space, I would like to do what I can to preserve your right to enjoy art, antiques, and design. All of us, whatever our opinion, whether we bleed blue or red, or some weird purple-y mixture, have a right to enjoy the beauty of the world around us. And yes, there are bigger issues out there, there are lives and liberties at stake that far eclipse painted furniture, but I have to start somewhere. I have to start by doing what I can.

         If you want to shout at me, and you want to hash it out, then come find me somewhere else, because I will maintain this Heir and Space page as sacred, as a safe place, where hopefully, no matter how far apart we are in geography, opinion, temperament, or morality, we can all enjoy the simple humble pleasure of pretty colors, elegant carving, and cheeky details.

        That being said, I will continue to be wholly intolerant of people who get shout-y at me for painting furniture. I'm not a saint, I only have so much self control. ;-)

A Maple Dining Table in Ink Blue

I think this ink blue is my favorite furniture color. I have a federal mahogany hutch that hasn't been spoken for yet that I'm just dying to do in it. So dramatic. My favorite part about the color is that I've double distressed it so below is a layer of cheeky teal that peeks through at the distressed spots. So fun and funky! I refinished this magnificent solid rock maple dining table custom for a client. It was a pleasure to work on, really just an exceptionally high quality piece of furniture. We went with a darker stain for the top and the ink blue for the base.
       There's something wrong with my camera, I've noticed my pictures are getting more and more blurry as of late. I think I'll need to buy a new one, which is fine with me, I never particularly liked this one anyhow. So apologies for the weirdly blurred photos.

A Federal Mahogany Hutch in Blue and Cream

I'm sort of kind of taking today off, or well, that's what I'm telling myself. I've already sent this lovely c.1940 mahogany hutch off to its new home this morning, and prepped a coffee table for pick up, and at some point later this afternoon my picker is dropping off a couple new pieces of furniture, but between all that I'm going to run about seven errands that I've been ignoring, catch up on my horrifying and ever mounting backlog of emails, and clean my incredibly messy house. Does that count as a day off? I'm hoping to finish in time tonight to have a nice big martini and maybe do a bit of water coloring.

        Also, damn it's cold out all of a sudden,
        Also, Also I'm listening to THE BEST book on audio right now. I took a break from listening to serial killers and disasters to enjoy 'How to Be a Tudor' by Ruth Goodman. It's absolutely brilliant and fascinating. I can't recommend it enough!

And on to the main event-

         My old boss and mentor once told me in regards to antique sales, "You'll make 80% of your profit on 20% of your purchases". Truer words have never been said. I'm pretty strict in my purchasing strategies; there's so much wonderful furniture out there ripe for the picking that I rarely need to dig deep into the coffers to maintain an ever flowing supply of projects to happily clutter my workshop. This hutch, for example, was $50. And that's about as high as I like to go on hutches of this type, it's supplies and time that eat up my margins, and of the two, it's time especially. This hutch, as much as I love it, and as happy as I am with its outcome, was a time hog.

         I purchased it from the ReStore in Cromwell a couple weeks ago and a lovely client of mine snatched it up straight away for her new dining room. I've already done a drop leaf table and a little server for her, and a table and chair set is heading her way in a week. She's got a great eye and pushes the boundaries a little bit, which I LOVE. So we went with ink blue shelves, mahogany refinished drawer fronts, and new (antique salvaged) oval Federal brass pulls. All a great plan, lots of challenges.
        Sanding the drawer fronts was tricky because I needed to fill the old hardware holes, re-color them so they'd be invisible when re-stained, and drill the new holes, then very very carefully sand the fronts so as not to slip through the highly figured mahogany veneer. I also had to replace a pane of glass. The missing pane made it easier to paint the interior on that side (trying to paint the tucked away bits on the other side was exceedingly trying), but putting the replacement pane of glass in was challenging. I had to do a fair bit of work on the feet, or rather the false feet that you can see, that don't actually touch the ground, but daintily hide the chunky real feet that are behind them. We choose to do what I've come to call a "double distress" a technique in which I paint the case all one color, then a second different color so that when distressed the first shade peeks through. And on and on it went. No one thing was impossible or even particularly challenging, but taken as a whole, I'd say I spent somewhere around fifteen hours on this hutch, or about twice what a typical one takes me.

            That being said, I had such a good time with it. It was very forlorn before, and boy is it lovely now. And this client is really a sweetheart and has been a pleasure to work with, and let me tell you, that makes a HUGE difference.

A Pennsylvania Dutch Bookshelf

I love going off the beaten path when it comes to furniture. Sometimes I feel like if I paint one more white oak dresser I'm going to scream, or drown myself in martini. So this vintage pine bookshelf was a delightful breath of fresh air. I spotted it at the flea market weeks ago and then in preparation for a big rain storm I carried it down to our basement to store. And then, even though I was doing it custom for a client, and had already put the first coat of paint on it, I ignored it for almost a month, mostly because I didnt feel like lugging it back out of the basement, which is naughty, but there you have it.

        When I did finally carry it back out into the open air earlier this week I powered right through the rest of the project. The client wanted a bold sunflower yellow with a lighter yellow backboard. After it was all painted I sent her a little sneak peek and we agreed it was lacking, needed a little something more to jazz it up, she asked if I could paint something on the two paneled doors on the bottom, to which I replied:

 

She loved the idea of Fraktur, though the unicorn was a close second. So we used this image as a starting off point. It's a piece of Fraktur by master folk artist Samuel Kindig Gottschall (1808-1898). Fraktur was a form of ink and watercolor decoration used to embellish important documents (awards of merit, marriage licenses, birth and baptismal certificates etc). The art was transported to the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th century by German speaking immigrants, and was most popular in the Mid Atlantic Dutch communities through the third quarter of the 19th century. The whimsical designs were either hand painted or later printed for larger distribution. 

Here's the inspiration piece we selected:

 

c.1834 by Samuel Gottschall

I set to work first penciling in the design, then hand painting it with craft acrylic paint, then I sanded and distressed the entire bookcase and sealed the whole thing with dark wax for an aged feel.

 

And here's my re-interpretation of it for the bookcase!