Restoration of a tiled room with molding

This was a difficult job. Putting makeup on tiles! The client felt very sentimental about this room and wanted to keep it and have it look good. There were many old holes and stains. The tiles were lovely, wisteria and other flowers but the general impression was not clean. 

I scrubbed them, even sanded some to remove old grout and mortar. I filled in the holes then went about retouching them with acrylic artist paint. As they were very old tiles, each has a slightly different hue. I had to mix a slightly different color for each retouch I did. I warned the client that the overall effect would be cleaner and better but that looking closely, paint would never have the same aspect as tile.

 After retouching, I worked on the wood molding that had been painted flat green and was chipping. There were however small examples of original tiled molding to use as inspiration. I sanded the wood and painted it white. I then applied highlights and shadows like the original.

I finished by painting the radiator egg shell white like the background tiles.

Decorative painting on a wood and tiled fireplace

 I hadn't seen this fireplace before the painters applied white paint to the panels so don't know what it originally looked like. With the architect and the client, we decided to use the color of the lovely dark red tiles at the bottom and the ochre yellow ones.

 I used artists oil paint for the panels. The luminosity of the patina doesn't show in my photos which is too bad as the panels glow a bit.

I then realized that the tiles were stained with dark brown wood varnish so scrubbed them with acetone. I also retouched the wood and bamboo bits with a little brown paint to mask the nicks.

False Marble Fireplace

 After doing false stone and false bricks, I'm now doing false marble on the same job in the enormous town house in a very wealthy district in Paris.

As the original false marble was not very nice and rather damaged, the architect advised me to re-do it entirely and the lovely client told me to do what I thought would be best. (so cool!)

I sanded and primed it in off white. I put an ochre patina on the inner part thinking it would look good with the parquet floor. Then I did a softish pink fantasy marble. It was a bit of a whim but why not?

False Stone Work / Fausse Pierre

This entranceway had an elevator installed and doors moved. There was a lot of plaster rebuilding. The client wanted to keep  the old false stone work so I was asked to do the same thing on the new parts and also fix up any damaged areas.

Here I am using an old ruler to paint in the joints.

And a thin wooden strip which is the classic tool to rule in mortar.