Decayed Elegance, More Than Just a Look

A few months ago Cathy and I decided that we would take our business a bit more global by starting a blog. Our goal was to educate our potential customers about what we do and the way that we achieve our look. The response has been absolutely great, actually a bit unexpected. Truth be told, it is a little hard to keep up with but we love every minute of it.

One of the questions that we have been asked most often is, “What is the name that you give to your furniture style”. This is actually a really good question but I can’t define it until I clarify what it isn’t. A few people have called our look victorian. This really couldn’t possibly be further from the truth. A victorian color palette was actually quite a bit brighter than the color palette that we use today to accomodate for the muted lighting provided by gas powered fixtures. Although we tend to think of the victorian color palette as heavy and dark, that is simply because the colors that have survived from that time period have darkened with age and time and the modern interpretation of the victorian palette includes this influence from  – dark, heavy colors that were once much brighter. We use a more modern color palette and most of our colors are somewhat softer and lighter but not brighter than the Victorians would have enjoyed. Also, we love, love, love the aged, distressed look and a victorian lady or gentleman would not have had any part of distressing or aging. They wanted a clean, polished look on new purchases that included mostly stained woods and not painted finishes.

So, this brings us back to the question, what is our look and how would we define it? As I said, we like the distressed, aged look. It combines an interesting and artistic looking finish with a nostalgic quality. The idea that a piece of furniture has seen history and has all of the scars to prove it is quite appealing. But, because we are trained artists we often choose to take this distressed, aged look and add elements to create lovely art furniture. The addition of lovely painted florals or simple scenes can take an ordinary piece of furniture and make it quite extraordinary. It is a step beyond simple distressing to create a very unusual and lovely finished heirloom quality piece that will stand the test of time. It has the decay of a timeworn, aged finish with the elegance of art created through paint….Decayed Elegance.

We have settled on this look for our furniture because it works in so many houses. The look can be quite lovely in a classically beautiful house, a house that has a primitive feel and all of the looks in between. Decayed Elegance is lovely, timeworn, artistic and a look for all settings.

Let me show you some examples:

Until next time,

Paul