St. Georges Bar

The St. Georges bar is a great place outside of Paris in an eastern suburb. A few brothers run it for fun customers. It was just terribly cluttered and desperately needed a make over!

The ceiling was bright yellow (a thick, sponge patina) and the walls were covered with an intense, very aggressive purple. But hey, people came anyway and the regulars were very at home there.

vu du bar avant

They didn’t want to close the bar for too long so we worked over a weekend, the Wednesday November 11th holiday and finished up on the following Thursday night doing the finish on the walls and the silver glaze on the wood. A very tight schedule, indeed.

avant

We started on Saturday morning priming and patching. The brothers and a girl friend wonderfully emptied out the place of knickknacks, posters and bottles! They went away for the weekend, which was good for them as they work long, hard days. Amusingly, many of the regulars stopped by, made themselves (and us) coffee and inspected our work usually finishing with, ‘You’re not going to finish on time’. (Thanks guys for the confidence!)

avant

But we just kept working in a steady manner fixing the walls and covering the yellow ceiling. When our friends stopped by asking us about the choice of palette and expressing worry that we wouldn’t finish, we laughed and said that we hadn’t yet determined the colors and that of course we would finish on time.

The owners had been so happy with our work re-doing the restaurant area of St. Georges in August (more about that soon) that they gave us carte blanche. However total freedom isn’t as easy as one would think, and so on that Saturday morning upon arriving, I again asked one of the brothers if he had any ideas about the decoration and he said, ‘The colors of the Mediterranean’. Oh, that made us happy because it gave us direction.

avant

We also had to keep in mind the previous colors, which were so garish. We couldn’t use a muted, calm palette. It was a noisy, lively bar, not a tea salon. We decided on ochre red, which would go with the chocolate colored walls of the restaurant area. We wanted to create a separate space behind the bar so we juxtaposed two bright blues. The tiles had already been painted so we had no qualms painting them again. We used the delimitation of the tiles to paint stripes.

While decorating the restaurant this summer, we applied a silver patina to the door columns and decorations. (They had previously been painted in gold so we thought it wouldn’t be too over the top to do it in silver!) I had brought silver powder, mixing it with varnish to make a thick glaze. The metal reflects are much brighter, less pastier in homemade paint than in a readymade one. Henry loved it and kept the product in mind for staining the wood in the barroom.

in the works

So we finished the repairs and the priming on Sunday evening. We left the bar half done (hideous) for two days, leaving them to set it up for minimum operation. Wednesday, we applied two coats of ochre rouge on the walls, two coats of each blue behind the bar, and cleaned up the bits that we hadn’t noticed before (yes, that happens, you realize that there’s an entire area usually at knee level that you hadn’t treated with the rest of the repairs). A long difficult day, which resulted in clashing colors and silver stain samples applied haphazardly.. The patina would be done the following evening integrating the red. Apparently certain clients weren’t as confident of the outcome as our dear bartenders when they came for coffee on Thursday morning but that kind of opposition is part of the job.




I arrived on Thursday around 7:30pm, ready to work. It was weird for me to work after dark. But as it’s a bar, you figure that doing the decoration at night is legitimate as it will be seen at night. I started working on the patina, using the same texture as in the restaurant. I had an audience so played it up a bit. A little later the bartender got the clients to leave (not a very easy task) so we had some calm. We worked till after midnight. The decorative finish on the walls was done in record time.


Then we continued the silver glaze, applying it to almost everything. As a translucent stain on the paneling, it radically changed the appearance of the bar, modernizing it without being costly. We covered all the wood, the decorative molding and the columns around the door. I also added thin silver stripes between the blue bands, adding a little glitter behind the bar. The result of was rather magical, very sparkly.

Nous avons ressorti la patine (bien aimée) argentée du restaurant pour teinter le bois. Ce glacis fait maison est beaucoup plus beau que ce qu’on trouve chez un fournisseur.

Nous avons fini les réparations dimanche soir. On a laissé le bar dans cet état (moche) pendant les deux jours ouvrables. Puis nous sommes revenus le mercredi. On a posé les couches de fond (ocre rouge), les bleus derrière le comptoir et aussi les essais de patine argentée. Une journée longue et difficile. La patine sur l’ocre rouge sera effectuée le lendemain. Le rouge sans patine, les bleus sans finition et les échantillons de patine argentée ici et là faisaient n’importe quoi comme ambiance ; les clients s’inquiétaient jeudi matin en arrivant. Heureusement nos clients restaient zen.

Jeudi je suis arrivée vers les 19h30 (drôle d’heure pour commencer la journée de travail). J’ai commencé la patine sur les murs, le même graphisme qu’au côté restaurant. J’avais carrément un public pour me voir appliquer cette patine! Plus tard, ils ont pu virer les clients mais ce n’était pas facile. (Ce bar est vraiment bien aimé, même on plein chantier !) C’était plus calme, on a travaillé jusqu’au minuit. J’avais l’impression de faire de kilomètres de patine en rien de temps.

Le lendemain, on a appliqué le glacis argenté sur tout le bois. Cela faisait beaucoup plus moderne instantanément. On a ajouté de la patine argentée sur les moulures, autour de la porte et même entre les bandes bleues. Le résultat était assez magique et bien étincelant.