Homes Designs Ideas
Adding colour to furniture
Today, we need to overcome the puritanical insistence on naked wood. Stripped pine is practical for a working kitchen table, but there is no reason why the legs and edges of the table should not be painted.
Stencil kits abound and are a time-honoured way of treating furniture – particularly effective in subtle, dark, limited colours. Slightly more complex to achieve are the effects of wood glowing through the negative template made by ferns or finely cut leaves:
Simple treatment This nineteenth-century New England rabbit ear chair has whimsical ebony edges and bamboo touches to complement its graceful shape.
Subtle stencils
The solidity of this early American plankseat chair calls for a formal treatment: stencilled decoration in a sombre harmony of colour.
Freehand Motifs
Motifs for freehand painting can be as simple as you like – perhaps a basic border design or naive animal shapes. Often, our forebears tended to soften the outlines of their drawn subjects with dots or tiny curlicues – all adding textural enrichment spray or paint over the foliage – when done well, with a painstaking choice of raw material, this produces a finish with all the filigree charm of hand-made lace.
