French Impressions
December has been a very busy and creative month. Our latest project was a lot of fun. Our client is a well-known disc jockey in the Bay area. His father was born in Marseilles. He spent a lot of time there, so is fluent in French and has a lot of affinity for the area, its art and culture.
The area to be addressed was the kitchen/dining area. He wanted the room to have a feel of being in France. He had artwork, with very bright reds, yellows & blues. And he wanted to really push the envelope on color, using bright yellow for the walls. The existing space had light blue walls with ordinary knockdown texture, and old brown stained kitchen cabinets, which were going to stay for the present. So there were a number of problems with color and texture to address to make this work.
First we skimmed the walls and ceilings in the kitchen and adjoin room to create a uniform surface and get rid of the current texture. We created samples of color checking it out at different times of the day, with the idea of warming the room without being too glaring. We ended up used raw sienna, which we toned down with some italian sienna. Next, we settled on a subdued green trim color for the cabinets that would soften the wall colors, and get rid of the ugly brown. We didn’t plan on plastering the ceiling, so we painted the ceiling, trim and adjoining rooms (to tie in) in a French Vanilla color, which complemented the finish. For the wall plaster, we decided that we wanted to give it a café look, so that when entering you could get the feeling of being either in or outside. We ran the color layer with a vertical look, to give the impression of it running down. The clients were very thrilled with the dramatic makeover. The plastered walls have a color Van Gogh would be happy with. While this look might not work for all publics and tastes (especially the more conservative), it was great fun to work on a job where the client can think very creatively, likes a lot of life and color and we are given some license to run with it. You can see the results here (Note the pictures don’t really do justice, our plastering is much better than our picture taking)
