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House Tour Dates for 2008

Just a quick note to let you know that we have scheduled our 2008 dates for tours around "The Stencilled Home".  The list is down the left side of our blog.  If you would like further information or want to book a place, please contact us.

Visit Our House: The Panelled Jacobethan Room

A set of carved wood furniture was left to Chips and I by his aunt, so he designed a room around it.  This part of the house dates from the 1600's so we sought to create a similar look of that period. 

Our version owes more to the movie set rather than the history book and we named the result Jacobethan as it fell between the styles of Jacobean and Elizabethan.    

We stripped the existing vinyl wallpaper and freed the nailed down window shutters. The tiny fire place was removed and so was the one behind that.  Eventually the original fire space and cooking spit were revealed, but were now too big for the room.   

Compromise resulted in a half size hearth and our friend Stan Pike hand-forged the iron fire grate and dogs for us.   He also made all the iron candlabras and sconces in the room.   The paneling is all made from plywood and routed timber bought in lengths from a DIY store.  Our friend Geoff built all the panelling to Chip's design.  It was a first for both of them and Geoff went on to create many lovely wooden rooms in the years that followed. 

The wood is all painted with matt black interior paint.  I rubbed a dilute solution of this paint all over the floor to take away the yellowness of the pine boards.  An enlarged border of Diamonds runs along the edges of the room and each corner is puncuated with an outsize CS86 Tudor Rose similar to the fibre glass ones that appear on the panel frames.   Every panel on the wall is stencilled with either an herb or a crest from our Gothic, Medieval & Tudor collection.  We muddied the colours by applying acrylic varnish tinted with a little burnt siena paint over the stencilling. 

The same designs were  stencilled onto canvas and made into cushion covers.

The wall above the panelling has been stencilled in black acrylic paint.  The stencil design reminded me of plaster pargetting. This photo of pargetting was taken by Andrew Dunn .  The house was built in the 1400's. Just click on to any of our photographs to enlarge them

The table and chairs were not to our current taste but are useful and have an sentimental value so we covered them in stencilled canvas.  The table wears GMT 52  and the chairs have tie on skirts decorated with GMT 38 both in black acrylic paint. 

This room always smells wonderful, a combination of wood smoke and fig scented candles.   I keep all the garden prunings from sage, lavender and rosemary bushes in a big bakset by the fire.  Dried citrus peel is also flung in there.  They all make wonderful fire lighters.  We decorate the rooms in our home fairly frequently, but this one has not been touched for over ten years.  It appears in both our book and video of The Stencilled Home.

The years had taken their toll on the pale sisal mat.  Food and drink spillage along with fire sparks and feet had badly stained areas of it.  I remedied this by stencilling an all over pattern GMT 43 on the rug to disguise the offending areas. 

It worked better than expected and I photographed each stage of the process. I will blog it as a project very soon.

Real tours of The Stencilled Home, as opposed to blog ones will resume next month.  I will post the dates when the house will be open for viewing as soon as they are finalised. H

    

Rachel's red and blue stripey bathroom and the trip to London..

I returned to The Pavilion themed hotel in London again at the weekend. I had obtained a cheap train ticket by saving vouchers from the newspaper and thought I would visit a Christmas shopping fair at Olympia.  This time my room at Pavilion was called "Solitaire".   It had red and blue painted stripes on the wall, chandeliers, an empire style bed, and rich brocade at the window pelmet and ceiling.  It reminded me very much of a bathroom that Rachel created many years ago.  It was featured in our book.

  Rachel had gone to great pains to get just the right shade of red stripe to combine with the turquoise blue.   Her bathroom is in an attic and can be freezing so she wanted a warm colour.  Well, every bit helps.

A tent was made from iridescent silk to hide all the unglamorous paraphanalia that may feature in a bathroom and it was stencilled with IN47 Paisley Pack.  The floor was painted with emulsion paint and then stencilled with BB1 Gothic border using our Antique Gold paint.   Rachel has posted about two of her more recent bathrooms in the 'Tour of Our Stencilled Home' section of this blog.

The Christmas shopping fair was lovely, but I had not given myself enough time to do it justice so missed the Festival of Chocolate amongst other things.  Whilst there I bought myself a treat. I am very fussy about my coffee and this huge breakfast mug from Coffee & Cream is perfect with lots of room for foam and sprinklies.

My cheap rail ticket to London turned out to be a disaster.  Whilst I was waiting for my train home at six o'clock on Saturday evening, I realised my ticket was mistakenly booked for six that morning.  It cost me another ninety five pounds to get a single fare to Newcastle.  By the time a new ticket was sorted I had missed any chance of a connecting train for the last stage of the journey and had to get a cab home at further expense.  Don't even ask!  H. 

Visit Our House: The Adam Style Garden Shed

Happy Halloween!  Although we have a bat and a pumpkin stencil in our range I felt I did not have enough topical designs for a Halloween post.  So....here is our garden shed, resplendent with pumpkin. They were carved by Rachel and photographed by Colin Poole for our Book "The Stencilled Home".  The decoration in the shed was based on the plasterwork of Robert Adam.   I love the work of Robert Adam and one of his many influences was the classical Roman and Greek style.  Whilst Adam was on his 'grand tour' of France and Italy in 1748, the well preserved remains of Pompeii were being discovered.  Spookily enough, I was there two weeks ago and am preparing a post on the murals of Pompeii and Herculaneum for you.

The shed is just the normal common or garden variety.  We lined the interior with hardboard so that we had the smooth surface necessary for such a formal treatment.   The walls were painted with emulsion (latex) paint and the background for the different stencils were applied with contrasting colour.

White acrylic paint was used for all the stenciling.  Most of the stencils can be found in our Regency and Empire collection.  All the furniture was gilded with Dutch Metal in gold. Canvas cloth was cut to cover the floor.  The cloth was then painted, stencilled and varnished. The shed is used all summer as a sitting room. In the winter it is filled with mowers and garden furniture.

I did not decorate the shed.  It was a surprise project undertaken by my husband and friends whilst I was teaching in America.  I love it, and I shall leave you with a couple of pictures of the wild flower orchard in which it sits. H.

Visit our house: Rachel's Art Deco Attic Bathroom (new)

Well, here it is....176 hours of painting and stencilling later, the new bathroom scheme.  To see the original scheme in full detail, have a look at our post from July 28th, but here is the "before" shot:

and here are the "after" shots:

The two photos above are shot from the doorway going into the room.  The photo below is shot from the back of the room looking towards the door:

As I mentioned in my previous post, the "look" of this scheme is inspired by textiles and colours from the 1920's and 1930's with a slight oriental touch.  Oriental style was strong during that time so it is not out of keeping with the era (although I was not too worried about historical accuracy).  The room has a curved ceiling with beams.  I split the three main walls into two halves. The bottom, straight bit of wall was painted in matt black and stencilled with our JA45 Mokko pattern using gloss acrylic varnish:

The curved bit of wall and ceiling was painted bright orange.  Two wisteria motifs from our Japan range, JA133 and JA134, both cut at 150% and 200%, I stencilled in jade green, black, white, yellow, teal and magenta:

The wisteria randomly covers the sides of the ceiling with a few motifs going onto the ceiling itself.  The floor was painted burgundy and stencilled with an Art Deco repeat, DE314, in black.

It was given a coat of high gloss oil based varnish to protect it and to provide full-on shine.

I also added two extra lights to the room - a table lamp and floor lamp.  The table lamp shade was stencilled with our JA52 Waves stencil in Antique Gold paint:

The floor lamp has a teal velvet covered shade (I got it from Ikea) and I stencilled it in black with our MD50 Coral stencil (which Helen thinks looks like eyelashes):

Although the room looks completely different from the previous scheme, I really didn't add much more too it than before.  The wardrobe trunk and dressing table, although not in previous photos, has been in the room for a while.  The trunk is a nice screen for the toilet.  Other pieces of furniture, like this shelving unit, have been repainted and stencilled to match the new scheme.  I used an Art Deco flower, DE336, on the top of the unit:

The mannequin hands, which I picked up at my favourite local shop, RE (who also have a website), were moved into this room as a nod to the surrealist artists of the era.

This cocktail cabinet is a new (old) addition to the room.  I bought it from a charity shop for the bargain price of 8.50 GBP (about 17.00 USD).  The doors painted with a simple tree in black and gold, suited the scheme.  It is perfect for hiding away all my bottles of potions and lotions.  This photo shows the cabinet open:

It still has the original lemon squeezer and cocktail sticks attached to the inside lid.  You never know when you might need those in a bathroom.

As before, due to the size of the space, I was fortunate enough to treat this bathroom like any other room and was able to fit a lot of furniture and accessories in it.  I dyed the original slipcover on the chaise longue, which was black and white ticking, totally black. I have rehung the "indulge" sign over the door again, as, afterall, bathrooms should be places of sanctuary to indulge and hang out in at the end of a long day.  I also hung 4 black lace 90" drop panels on a hoop over the bathtub which can be pulled all the way around if wanted.  They are polyester so I do not have to worry about water damaging them.

I tried two new techniques in this room that I personally have not tried before.  To read more about what I learnt from decorating this room, read on.... R.

VIsit our House: The Ottoman Room

I thought it was time to tour another of our guest rooms.

This is The Ottoman Room.    A photograph of it was used for the cover of our book The Stencilled Home and the video of the same name. The room no longer exists, but in it's time,t was probably the most dramatic and arresting of the various rooms in our home.

At dawn, the metallic paint and gilding come alive with light.....not that I have witnessed dawn too often!  The designs are from the Ottoman Range at The Stencil Library. All the different areas of pattern have been confined within a border.  Sometimes the border is stencilled, other times it is provided by a wood or fabric trim.

A deep border features on three of the walls (OTT1).  Rather than break the run of pattern to accomodate a window we continued it by stencilling some MD fibreboard which my friend cut around to make a window pelmet.

Most of the stencilling in this room uses just four colours: they are Hookers Green, Burgundy, Gold and Copper. The floor was allowed an extra colour, Dioxazine Purple, which was applied to the grapes. We painted the sanded wooden floor with emulsion (latex) paint and then it was stencilled with OTT32 and OTT34.   My mother did the work and it was the first thing she had ever stencilled.  She complained that crawling around the floor hurt her knees so we tied pillows onto her legs and she completed the job.  Sorry, Mum.  The design on the bed covers is an enlarged OTT30 stencil.  We used our copper and antique gold paints.  You may notice a bright gold colour in the pattern. It was created by mixing a little of our rose gold powder in with the paint.   All these paints can be washed and dry cleaned.  The bed covers are made from a combination of heavy cotton and velvet and are currently for sale in our shop.  All our furnishings go there when a room is decommissioned.  Between the beds a stencilled hat box has been used as a table and I threaded an halogen bulb into the centre of a metal Moroccan lantern.  When illuminated the lamp casts shapes of metal tracery around the room throwing more pattern onto the silk canopies and ceiling.  The lamp was gilded using Dutch Metal Transfer Leaf.

Our radiators were stencilled using the same paint as the walls, floors and fabric.  The stencil has to be rolled in an out of the hollows in the radiator bars to keep the pattern unbroken.   The same design was repeated on the wardrobe door and is an enlarged OTT45.

The ceiling was a monster to stencil.  We used the OTT46 Quadrant stencil. 

Wherever possible, I now chop very large stencils into smaller pieces or ask someone to help.  This room has now been replaced with the comparatively minimalist Japanese Room.  I'll take you there on a future post.  Some of these photos were taken by Colin Poole -thanks, Colin.  They appear in our Stencilled Home book. H.

Visit Our House: Rachel's Attic Bathroom

I am currently in the process of redecorating my bathroom so am taking the opportunity to show you the old scheme.  Our house has three floors and Helen & Chips live on the first two floors and I have my own "flat" on the third floor, in the attic.  There are 4 rooms in the attic: a living room, a bedroom, a dressing room and the bathroom shown here.  Despite the lower curved ceilings, all the rooms are large and there is a fair amount of light as there are windows and skylights in the roof.  The scheme for the bathroom is very simple.  I must admit, most of the time, I like bright colours and lots of pattern, but every now and again, I will do a subtle and pale room.   This is about as minimalist as I go and the new bathroom scheme is a riot of colour and pattern again.  As soon as I have it finished, I will post the photographs so you can see the change.  The bathroom and dressing room were created out of one huge attic room.  Even with splitting the space into two rooms, the bathroom is unusually large and I take full advantage and treat it like any other room with furniture and accessories.  As we installed the bathroom when we moved into the house, we had the freedom to decide where to place everything.  I happily sacrificed having a shower installed for being able to put the clawfoot bath in the middle of the floor and have never regretted it.  Bathrooms should be a sanctuary, a place to relax and indulge and that is certainly what mine is all about.  I have always liked French classical style (for more on that look, take a peak at our "Marie Antoinette" post from March 8th).   The walls, floors, bathtub and furniture were all painted in tone of what I call an orchid pink - it is that shade of pink that has a strong element of violet in it so that in certain lights the room is very pink and in others, quite lilac.  The stencilling is very simple.  I took a classic gothic damask stencil, GMT53 Repeat, and gave it a contemporary twist by stencilling it in iridescent white paint.  The result is extremely subtle.  The best thing about working with iridescents on a pale background is that colour of the pattern changes completely depending on the light.  When it is dark, you lose the glittery effect and the stencilling is simply a darker shade of the background colour.   When the sun is out, the pattern becomes even more subtle and twinkles away in the light.  The stencilling repeats over the straight bit of wall around the room.  The curved ceiling has been left bare.  I hung a pearlescent white beaded curtain at the end of the tub for decoration.   Any furniture was covered in black and white ticking.  There is a bit of antique gold on some of the accessories.  It is a much more muted scheme than we usually do, but extremely effective in the space.  I can easily spend hours in this room.  As a teaser, I will only say that my new scheme is a bit Art Deco and a bit Oriental, inspired by fabric designs and vintage kimonos from the 1930's.  It is definitely a lot more patterned and a lot more colourful.  Hopefully I shall have it finished in the next few weeks or so.  If you want more tips about working with iridescent paints, please read on.....

Visit our House: Napoleon's gilded bedroom

I thought it was time to show you another room from our home because we are open to the public this Wednesday.

I will post all the dates for the 2007 house tours in a side list. Napoleon's gilded bedroom was originally created to test a product that we created called Instant Size. It allows an easy way of stencilling with foils and powders. It was used to gild pattern onto the walls, furniture and fabrics in this guest bedroom.

Yes, even the ceiling fabric was gilded....

so were all the curtains....

so were the bed covers....

and the awnings above them.    

The Instant Size is the red glue stencilled onto the fabric then sheets of gold Dutch Metal transfer leaf are being pressed onto it.  The excess gold will be brushed away to leave a clear, crisp imprint.

The carpet is

Visit Our House: Arts & crafts dining room.

Our home is open once a month for tours of it's stencilled rooms.  I am late in getting the dates published this year but check in next week and they will be posted along with more information about the tours.  Throughout the coming year I will feature many of the stencilled rooms on this blog and wherever possible a project will accompany it.  The tour starts with the Arts & Crafts style dining room. 

The stencils used in the dining room are mostly found in our Arts & Crafts Collection.  Water-based household paints were used to paint and to stencil both the floors and walls.  The repeating pattern on the walls was stencilled using a foam paint roller. 

The rollers were also used on the floor.  The smaller pink flowers were applied by brush because precision was needed.  The first rule of decorating floors is to try and get someone else to do it, it saves wear on the knees that way.  My husband Chips did most of the stencilling and gilding on the floor.  If you click on any of the images they will come up larger to show detail. Tile designs were used on the centre section of the floor and an enlarged border surrounds them.  Chips found a quotation from the 1600's about sinless people eating and drinking well, then shuffling off to paradise.  It is reproduced in copper leafed lettering and lies within the border.

On completion, the floor was protected by five coats of water based varnish.  Apply that with a foam roller too and start in the far corner then varnish your way out of the room.  It is usually dry enough to do a further coat in 45 minutes or so but follow the instruction on your chosen product. 

Copper transfer leaf was used to make the panel shapes on the lower wall.  A lily design was stencilled onto them with acrylic paint.  If the paint will not key to the leaf then add a little soap based detergent to the paint.  A tiny amount!!