Custom French Provincial Painted Furniture By Blue Virgo Design

 

If you are looking for something special, look at this designer. 

Tasteful colors and techniques are used which will timelessly fit in most homes decorated around the French style. 

Thomasville 9 drawer French Provincial Chest – $1444

Pair of Thomasville French provincial nightstands with floral accents – $1333 Free Shipping 

French Painted Provincial Nightstands $1222

A stunning French Dresser set in blue

Rustic Brown Painted French Provincial Highboy – BlueVirgoDesign.com

French Country Rustic Buffet – $1222 – BlueVirgoDesign.com

French Provincial Bleached Tall Dresser By Shabby Roots Boutique

This dresser was listed in the SF Bay Craigslist.

From the listing:

Modern farmhouse bleached wood tall dresser French chest of drawers$1,095 (vallejo / benicia)

Gorgeous natural raw bleached wood tall dresser. This antique French provincial chest of drawers is where rustic meets chic. This piece took me a solid week from start to finish and I’m so thrilled with the way it turned out. This piece was sanded down to bare wood (some of the old finish was left in cracks and crevices on purpose to make it more interesting) the wood was then bleached, and bleached again, and again- white washed, and sealed with some dark wax and white wax for a perfect buttery smooth to the touch matte finish.

This piece is solid wood and features 6 smooth dovetail drawers, stunning wood grain, beautiful curves, moulding and feet, and those striking French hardware pulls with a bronze patina set this piece off perfectly. This piece is truly a one of a kind and won’t last long.

40” wide
54” tall
20” deep

Pick up in Vallejo or curbside delivery is available for an extra fee (sorry NO STAIRS)

$1095- Price is firm- cash, PayPal or Venmo accepted

Follow us on Instagram @ShabbyRootsBoutique for new inventory added weekly!

How To Update Vintage French Provincial Furniture

French Provincial Furniture From Stiltskin Studios Esty

A Beautiful Light Pink French Provincial Furniture From Stiltskin Studios Esty

Vintage French furniture can be a terrific opportunity to getting the upscale French looks for less.  Vintage furniture can be found in most American and Canadian cities and for the most part they are affordable.  Many of these vintage sets can be transformed with paint, or even stripped of it’s varnish and re-stained a different color.   Vintage French furniture allows you the opportunity to experiment with finishes, textures, colors and distressing techniques, when the prices are reasonable.  There are so many possibilities with vintage French Provincial furniture.

Before you consider colors, decide whether your interior scheme is country style, or formal and elegant.  There are a number of ways to give these pieces a facelift, but truly most French styles fall into these two categories.

Ebay

1.  French City Styles

French furniture can have a polished look, as well as a country look.  Depending on the paint color choice, and the style of furniture, it can be painted to have a more sophisticated look, or looks that resemble furniture belonging to country homes.

My other site- French Style Authority features many of the upscale French looks that you might see in formal French interiors.  Some examples of the formal French looks, include extravagant marquetry chests, gilt wood chests and wall clocks, and upholstered furniture with rich silk fabrics.

How To Pull Off This Look…..

-Consider painting your furniture gray and white wash the frame with a creamy white.  Upholster your pieces with rich pastel upholstery in raw silk, or velvet.  Raw silk has some of the most saturated color choices around, and will surely give your pieces a high end look.  Satin is another choice to get that rich Marie Antoinette look for your home.  You can also shop for fabric online to help you reupholster your furniture yourself. Check out your favorite fabric shops online and get the materials shipped right to your home. You can either reupholster it yourself or hire a company to do it for you.

-Go for the more saturated colors.  This photo shows an exceptional emerald green and gilt wood combination.  Have custom marble or stone fit for your dresser, or buffet tops.  See this post “Decorating With Pastels” for more inspiration.  To make your dresser look richer, gold leaf the hardware, and add more hardware to the chest, such as furniture mounts and keyholes.

-While I can hardly compare this 75 thousand dollar vitrine to a 300 dollar French chest, you can certainly borrow some ideas for your own furniture.  Instead of painting your furniture, why not stain it?  Simply remove the finish with a heat gun, or paint stripper.  Consider faux finishing the raw furniture with lines that look like the expensive veneer woods.  (This would only work on the solid wood pieces) All that is needed is polystain, and a couple thin brushes.  Improve the look of your furniture by adding custom ormolu to the drawers, feet, and hammer on matching keyholes to a dresser or chest.  Gold leaf the hardware to create the look of a matching set.

– Color really makes a huge difference on these pieces.  Paint companies such as Annie Sloan, Darryl Carter For Benjamin Moore, and The Williamsburg Color Collection By Benjamin Moore are specially designed after the historical colors.  Having the just right color can make a tremendous difference in the overall appearance.

-9 Ways To Transform Vintage Furniture- Painted Furniture Online
-The Interior French Furniture Of Versailles- The French Style Authority
-The Best Ways To Get The French Look For Less-The French Style Authority
-Marie Antoinette Behind the Scences For Vogue Magazine- The French Style Authority
-French Furniture Restoration ~Gold Leafing Tips- The French Style Authority

-Absolutely Breathtaking French Painted Furniture- The French Style Authority

2.  French Country Styles

The country styles can have bold color as well, although you will find the finish and colors to be different.  Consider the color palette of the French countryside such as the purples, green and blues found in Frederic Mechiehe’s Provence Home In Hyeres, and yellows, seen in Tremolet’s Chateau d’Ailly in Normandy.

In this post, “5 Paint Color Choices For Provincial Furniture” I show a number of country colors that would work perfectly on painted chairs, desks, armoires, beds and chests.  Consider skipping the bright gold hardware for rusty pieces, or iron looking hardware.

– Don’t just paint your pieces one solid color and add hardware, and call it a day….  be sure to really highlight the curves and carvings.  This yellow armoire wouldn’t look the same without having the carved areas highlighted in white

W Magazine French Chair - ROCHE BOBOIS chair, from $4,174, roche-bobois.com
Gift Guide Garden Party- W Magazine
ROCHE BOBOIS chair, from $4,174, roche-bobois.com.

 Scalamandre- China Rose on pair of Begere Chairs

Scalamandre- China Rose on pair of Begere Chairs- Furbish Studio

Marie Antoinette Seen on Business Insider
 
Bright red, and pastel colors seen on Marie Antoinette Seen on www.businessinsider.com
Drexel Touraine French Provincial Dresser
Drexel Touraine French Provincial Dresser- axsoris.com

My Louis XV French Provincial Chest Makeover

My French Provincial Louis Dresser MakeoverWhite-washing is basically applying glaze mixed with white paint to the surface of your wood furniture, giving your piece a two-tone effect.

The two tone effect is basically where the wood shows through the paint finish.  You can achieve this result by liming, which can be picked up at your local hardware store, or paint alone can achieve this finish.

This effect ONLY works when you have unfinished wood which enables the paint to soak into the furniture.

White-washing can also work with oil based paint in combination with paint thinner.   If you are working with vintage French Provincial you might run into a stumbling block like I did, where you have a really hard white melamine paint that is baked on.  If you have patience you could strip off the paint.

Every dresser is different, some manufacture paint finishes are relatively easy to remove, while others are very difficult.  If you have a white french provincial dresser that has a white finish, check out what I did with my painted french dresser:

I had a white dresser so I decided to fake the appearance of a white painted piece which was distressed showing the wood underneath.  What I did to mine was started with a orange oil paint, and layered on color with slight distressing in between to produce a finish that looked to have layers of blues and creams and beiges to the finish.You can also achieve this look by mixing water based paint with glaze BUT, for most of my pieces I prefer to work with oil paint, rather than with latex, so this article discusses OIL rather than latex paint

 I would highly recommend Rust-Oleum’s oil paint in satin or flat finishes. Rust-Oleum’s satin oil dark taupe is one of the most frequent colors I use when I paint furniture

Using a faux washing technique with soft butter yellow satin oil paint is one of the best colors to use on top of dark taupe.  Additional oil colors such as the butter yellow can be purchased from specialty paint stores that tint oil paint.  I use this technique on a lot of my projects.   I have come to know that my local Home Depot paint store no longer carries this color.  Here it is on Amazon.

Rust-Oleum 241238 Satin Enamels Spray, Dark Taupe, 12-Ounce

The other color which works well is Rust-Oleum’s color Fossil in latex .  Again using white-washing techniques, Rust-Oleum’s oil flat paint tinted with an off white works extremely well in creating a washed Swedish finish.

Rust-Oleum American Accents Spray, Satin Fossil

 I would suggest Sherwin Williams for oil paints, and you also can get virtually any color with Behr’s Paint and Primer in one.

Here are a few of my staples:

 

If you are working with latex paint a glaze can go a long way toward adding depth to your furniture.

Ralph Lauren Faux Technique Glaze

If you are working with oil, translucent finishes can be achieved by simply working with paint thinner and stippling it on to your furniture just like you would with glaze.

Ralph Lauren Faux Technique Glaze 

Many french provincial reproduction furniture pieces have such durable finishes that they are almost impossible to chip, which is an excellent quality to have.  If you are looking for a french dresser, and you want to make it over using a white washed appearance, I would highly suggest working with a dresser that has just a wood finish and no paint.

Typical white french provincial furniture pieces are often found with rock hard enamel paint.  The challenge with these white finishes is they are especially hard to strip.

Many vintage manufactures have taken the enamel finish and combined them with chemicals such as melamine paint and baked them in large ovens, which gave them rock hard solid paint finishes. Stripping these finishes is next to impossible.

So what do you do if your original paint is white?   

The dresser I painted was solid wood, but also had an original white finish, so I had to duplicate the look of wood with a coat of orange paint, so that when I distressed the furniture, it would give the appearance of some depth to the paint finish.

The next layer is an off white beige color, which I was able then to distress showing the orange.

After the distressing, I used a white oil paint diluted with thinner and dabbled it onto the dresser giving it a little bit of a textured look.  Additional white washes were applied to give it an overall white effect.   I did about 7 layers of additional washes until the entire piece was finished.  Here was the transformation.

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