Saturday, September 20th, 2008
Michelle Simpson says it wasn’t until she quit smoking that she discovered her creativity.
“I needed something to keep my hands busy. I started with beading and candle-making, and that’s when I discovered I was creative,” said the Ringgold, Ga., resident.
She said she burned out on candle-making about the same time she bought her first home. Ms. Simpson said she purchased some do-it-yourself books to start redecorating her new home and thought she’d try her hand at faux finishes.
Six years and several professional training classes later, her home is a showcase of her skill. Walls, furniture, kitchen cabinetry and even accent pieces show the versatility of these eye-deceiving treatments.
Her faux finishes are not the old-school ragged, sponged or string-painted styles. These are complex, multilayer looks applied with professional products unavailable to most do-it-yourselfers.
For her entry foyer, she troweled sheets of contractor’s paper with a thick metallic finish in a shade between bronze and dark champagne. She next added texture to the paper by crumpling it, then smoothing it out. She stained it, then hung it like wallpaper. The metallic finish bounces light from the overhead fixture in an area that receives little natural lighting.
Her home’s kitchen — formerly a country decor of blue floral wallpaper, blue formica countertops and oak floors and cabinets — now has an Old World feel with textured walls in a warm sunset gold contrasted by black cabinetry. Quick shots of color are added in the red hand-blown glass pendant and other jewel-tone lighting fixtures from local glass studio Ignis.
Ms. Simpson said she gave the kitchen walls the look of aged plaster with a troweled compound that she glazed to add depth and highlight the texture of the surface. She painted the cabinets black with a distressed finish so the oak underneath is visible in spots, particularly around the pulls where hands would frequently touch the wood.
The kitchen’s gold hue flows into the adjoining living/dining area, which is filled with dark brown leather furnishings. A yellow side table that she has given an ostrich-skin finish adds a whimsical touch. The main wall of the dining room is finished in a subtle multilayer glaze.
One of her most impressive makeovers is the guest bath.
“When I bought this home in 2004, the bath had a ceramic white tile floor, big oak vanity and the walls were white beadboard on the bottom half with sponged walls above. A nautical border went around the top of the room, and it had a popcorn ceiling,” she said.
Ms. Simpson scraped the popcorn off the ceiling, then troweled on a product that re-creates the look of sandstone to smooth out the ceiling. The compound has crushed walnuts in it that give soft, barely visible streaks of brown to the sandstone finish.
She replaced the tile floor with a pillow-edge Travertine marble floor and used the same marble as a backsplash behind the sink. A conversation piece in itself, the unusual sink is made of tumbled onyx, which shimmers in shades of white and gold. The sink sits atop a black vanity with a sleek, contemporary stainless faucet behind it.
The bath’s walls are a multilayer plaster technique that is troweled and glazed. The room’s overall illusion is one of multiple layers of stone.
Other interesting treatments are found throughout the house, such as a clear glass bowl that she covered in a tortoise-shell faux finish. It sits upon a tabletop that appears to be leather but is actually a treatment involving stained cheesecloth.
Ms. Simpson said a good faux finish passes the test if viewers can’t tell where application began or ended.
Ms. Simpson has transformed the garage of her home into a showroom for clients to see samples of her designs. Her work ranges from $2.50 to $12 per square foot depending on the difficulty of the finish being applied. Her company, Ambiance Creations, may be reached by calling 309-3289.
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Monday, April 28th, 2008
Creating Old World looks with modern methods
After studying in Italy, faux finisher Michelle Simpson works her magic on an Ooltewah home
By Jan Galletta
Staff Writer
In her five years as a decorative painter, Michelle Simpson crisscrossed the country for classes on new techniques and refresher courses in the faux-finishing skill she plies with her Ambiance Creations. Earlier this fall, the Chattanoogan logged some longer-distance learning when she spent three weeks in a 13th-century Italian villa studying venerable buildings and the art of Venetian plastering.
“It was a ‘storybook’ of grape vineyards, olive orchards and the hills of Tuscany,” she said of the 60-acre estate on the outskirts of Siena, a city surrounded by a stone wall where cars are verboten.
“We looked at Old World architecture and tried to recreate aged Mediterranean looks,” she said.
Faculty ranged from an elderly Italian painter (who spoke no English) to Susie Goldenberg of the Atlanta-based Paintin’ the Town Faux, according to Ms. Simpson, 35. She said students honed their skills in fresco and trompe l’oeil painting, as well as in stenciling murals and Venetian-style plastering.
When an Ooltewah client tapped Ms. Simpson’s company to “age” his new home’s walls, she tackled the project, she said, by employing modern methods and materials to achieve an ancient appearance.
“Venetian plaster has a very textured look but is smooth and cool to the touch,” she said. “It originated as a way to emulate marble, which was too expensive to bring in to many parts of Italy.”
In her customer’s dining room, Ms. Simpson used a stained Venetian plaster infused with marble dust, which gives a golden luster to the walls’ thick surface. As many as five layers of the lime-based material may be applied with a trowel before the faux finish is burnished to a high sheen, she said.
The painter said she planned to enhance the powder room with a Florentine faux-stone finish that features embedded cheesecloth. She said, “It will give a very Old World look, very aged and rugged.”
For the Ooltewah project, Ms. Simpson said the client chose a typical Tuscan palette of deep orange, gold, red and brown. She said, “Rarely was green or blue used in Venetian plaster.”
Not unlike the novel effect obtained by embedded cheesecloth, the newest trends in faux finishing include adding cracked burlap to create a rustic mien, using crumpled tissue to evoke a leather look and producing custom coverings on canvas, which not only yields an unusual finish but permits the decorative panels to be removed and later reapplied on a different surface, according to Ms. Simpson.
“With faux, so many exciting things are happening, and with all the new products, (the possibilities for) looks are infinite,” she said. “The popularity of faux is one reason that wallpaper sales are down.”
While data to support a dip in consumption of conventional wallcoverings is hard to find, the Nippon Interior Fabrics Association of Japan’s market reports for 2003, the most recent posted online, show a decrease of 10.6 percent from 2002’s figures — which also represented a 12.2 percent drop from the previous year. But the association’s Web page attributed the decline to a slump in housing starts.
Ms. Simpson said the emergence of more durable products now allows for exterior applications of faux finishes, such as on door surrounds. She said, “The best surface for faux is nonporous — a satin paint or a 100-percent acrylic base. The flatter the surface, the more material is absorbed.”
She said that costs vary, according to the selected finish and project size, but wall treatments run from $2 to $15 per square foot and that faux finishes on furniture and cabinetry range from $20 to $25 per linear foot.
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Monday, April 28th, 2008
10 top trends
Tri-State Home Show introduces an array of exciting products
By Jan Galletta
Staff Writer
From products that harness primeval energy sources to space-age entertainment spas, the recent 39th annual Tri-State Home Show boasted an eyeful of innovations for building, enhancing or maintaining a house.
Some 450 exhibitors filled 100,000 square feet of floor space at the Chattanooga Convention Center during the three-day event. Among their newest goods and services: A combination firepit and fountain for outdoor use, it has three button controls to send up flames, sprays of water, or both.
From mock ostrich skin to marble look-alike, today’s faux finishes are more varied and durable than their earlier counterparts, according to Michelle Simpson of Ambiance Creations in Ringgold, Ga.
“Faux painting has come so far, mostly because of the products that have been developed,” she said. “It goes on over oil, lacquer — there’s pretty much no surface I can’t do it on. It even has exterior applications.”
Prices for the multilayer decorative treatment vary by the design a consumer selects, but “it generally runs three to six times a professional painter’s fee,” said Ms. Simpson. “It’s comparable to high-end wallpaper.”
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