The main virtue today is youth. Almost every week, the beauty industry explodes with new products – all kinds of anti-aging agents. And in the interiors, meanwhile, there is a struggle for the opposite effect. Maybe the designers decided to age the houses on purpose in order to set off the youth of their owners?
A designer friend complains: “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I ordered antique furniture for clients in Italy. After installation, they call in hysterics and demand to replace everything. “What’s the matter?” – “They brought us some kind of used closet!” This incident happened several years ago, and it is already difficult to remember whether the designer managed to convince the owners that the front of the cabinet is a victim of fashion, and not a careless attitude towards it …
We take the old stuff!
Earlier, starting repairs, everyone tried to quickly get rid of the junk. Today, furnishing a new apartment, young people are not at all opposed to accepting an inheritance from their grandmother in the form of a blackened mirror or chest of drawers. The remake hurts the eye. The notorious “zeitgeist” turned out to be not such a metaphor. The delicate scent of old wood cannot be confused with anything. Picturesque stains on the damp plaster of Venice or dark cracked beams in the apartments of the Parisian Marais – you cannot fake.
Aging furniture
Natural aging captivates with the fact that time itself has already taken care of everything, revealing the innate nobility of natural materials. To create such a legend in your home, it’s not bad to have fifty years in stock, or better a hundred. The years that have passed add charm to every detail, be it a brass damper or a ventilation grill. Why is there a lattice – old bricks, stones, boards and beams can completely transform the most rootless interior. Therefore, in the West, there is a real hunt for construction “antiques”. A passion for vintage materials is the credo of London-based company Retrovious, which sells rarities like boards taken from Buckingham Palace. Pine and larch, taken from the abandoned village huts of the North, are used for the manufacture of tables and dressers by the Russian company Eastwood. A garment made from naturally aged material is valued higher. It is understandable: “time is money”! Therefore, much more often we are dealing not with natural, but with artificial aging, which is achieved by mechanical or chemical action on a surface or thing.
Walls
The best soil for creating a noble scuff effect is the Provence style. And for him, the most important thing is the walls. To get the texture of a plastered wall covered with craquelure cracks, you need to use special compounds. Cracelure plaster is applied by the craftsman with a spatula and smoothed. Cracks will appear in places where the trowel has left plaster beads. So each master’s drawing is purely individual. Accelerated drying (for example, with a construction hairdryer) will lead to the fact that after 10-20 minutes the plaster will crack.
And the thicker the influxes were, the larger the craquelure will turn out. Unlike naturally cracked plaster, an artificially cracked surface must remain strong and not crumble. For this, a fixing compound is applied on top. After it dries, the cracks must be highlighted with a colored coating using a trowel and a sponge. And treat the wall surface with water-repellent wax. Another option for aged plaster is layers protruding from one another. This is how they usually look on the crumbling facades of old houses. In this case, colored layers of plaster are casually applied to each other so that they have different thicknesses. It is better to make the lower layers more saturated in tone. After the dried plaster has been sanded, it will show picturesque stains.
Gender
To get the floor, like in an Italian palazzo, you can take an aged stone – matte, porous, as if weathered, antique marble. So it becomes after processing with a sandblasting machine. Deep aging of the stone is achieved in special movable chambers with steel brushes. Thanks to this finish, chips and cracks form on the slabs, as if they had been walked on for more than a dozen years. A more affordable option is an artificial stone based on concrete. It is immediately molded into a shape that imitates the aged surface of a natural stone. For a matte effect, it is also sandblasted.
To give the “age” to the parquet board, the same methods are usually used as in the processing of furniture. Now, in any classic collection, be it Baker, Maggi Massimo, Zonta or Roche Bobois, there are several types of finishes that imitate the traces of time. These are patina, rustic, crackle, “traces” of a woodworm (or simply a “bug”). In old things, embossed panels, corners and joints are gradually rubbed off and become darker from a natural patina. When they want to get a patina artificially, a special composition is applied to the pre-painted and primed surface. It is sprayed over the entire area, and then the excess is removed with a cloth or sponge. A fixing varnish is applied over the patina. This aging gives expressiveness and depth to each line, as in the items from the Manoir collection from Roche Bobois. For rustic aging in factories, they use devices with steel brushes. They mercilessly peel off the soft fiber from the wood, so that the surface becomes more textured. Then, using sisal brushes, they grind the “raised pile” and tint the finished product to further enhance the contrast between hard and soft layers. Crackle technique is used to deliberately crack the paint layer, just like plaster. Crackle in furniture is one of the most time consuming processes. Several layers of soil (at least one of them must be colored) and the enamels are coated with a varnish-cracolet. When it cracks during the drying process, a layer of enamel and colored primer will appear through it. Since, as a result, the paint and varnish layer turns out to be quite thick, the crackle technique is suitable not only for natural wood furniture, but also for the facades of MDF cabinets.
A real woodworm bug is the curse of restorers. But artificial, perhaps, the prettiest “decoration” of classic furniture. Each factory imitates the moves of the bug in its own way. In one master they write out every move with a thin drill in a filigree manner, in the other they “shoot” the facades with small shot from a gun. The holes that appear are tinted to enhance the appearance. The Roche Bobois factory has a whole line of Provinciales classic furniture, where you can independently choose the aging technique for any model – by worming (“bug”), patina and painting. In Baker’s Milling Road collection, along with the “bug” things are deliberately unevenly tinted – they are left light at the edges. War has been declared on smug novelty! Even a “folk” floral drawing or ornament applied by a master by hand will not remain “fresh” either – it is mercilessly rubbed with a skin.
Since the surface of the wood looks older than its years, it would be unnatural to cover the furniture with brand new leather. Therefore, wrinkled, frayed, cracked or scratched leather is the best friend of aged wood, as in the Hickory Chair collection. The skin, brought to this state by chemical reagents, will continue to age. Soon, traces of your personal “scrawled” history will appear on it. The picture of the room “in years” will be complemented by a worn carpet. To turn a modern thing into an “antique”, manufacturers hand over carpets to bear. They are placed in the most popular places, so that the pile wears off naturally, but very quickly. Of course, it is possible to etch the color and finally ennoble the carpet by chemical means.
The times when metal utensils in everyday life were polished with GOI paste, removing the supposedly “harmful” patina from the metal, seem to be a terrible barbarism now. The naturally formed patina does not destroy the metal, but, on the contrary, protects it. In order to obtain it, the degreased metal surface is lubricated two to three times a day with a weak solution of acetic acid. In a warm room, within a few weeks, a real greenish patina will appear on bronze and copper (in composition – a relative of malachite).
Artificial patina on metal is just paint (like acrylic). In this way, the metal base of chandeliers and sconces is “aged”, getting blackened or greenish bronze, turning the metal into “aged gold” or “silver”. In the MK’GUAYER collection of lamps, copper fittings are coated with a composition with real gold and silver, which in its noble impulse has muffled the bright shine.
The designers decided that aged things should not be reflected in ordinary mirrors. This is how mirrors of a completely museum look appeared – not only in aged frames, but also with streaks and black spots on the amalgam. The protective layer on the back of the mirror is removed, the amalgam is sandblasted and etched. When looking into such a mirror, it is difficult to refrain from counting how many previous generations have seen their reflection in it. Carried away by the idea of aging the interior, you can decorate your house with handmade accessories. Wooden frames for pictures and photos are suitable for the experiment. The main thing is to choose the difficultly profiled surface of the baguette in order to obtain the most expressive tonal contrasts. The easiest option is to cover with a stain, for example from Sayerlak or Tikkurila, without a primer, an unpainted frame. After drying, go over the surface with sandpaper, and try to remove more paint on the protruding parts. In some places (think about which part of the product would wear out more), you can use a razor blade to reach a layer of wood that has only slightly absorbed the color. You can try to simulate the moves of the woodworm using a blunt nail and a hammer. But here you need much more virtuosity and dexterity – individual points and arbitrarily curved lines (as if accidentally exposed the moves of a bug) should go at different angles. After that, the coloring composition must be applied to the surface, which is darker in tone (almost black). And wipe immediately, removing excess “patina”. After drying, finally fix the result by covering the frame with colorless varnish. You can also patinate metal on your own – with aerosol paints (Rust-Oleum cans are suitable) or paint that is applied with a brush (you can use the WS-Patina composition). The latter must be rubbed on a palette to a semi-dry state and applied with sliding movements on textured details. For the paint to hold better, do not forget to degrease the metal surface in advance. Even from an ordinary piece of iron, you can achieve the look of aged brass (a combination of copper and bronze patina), noble bronze (dark graphite and gold or bronze patina) and even blackened silver (silver patina). You can also create the crackle effect on wooden items yourself. On the surface covered with colored acrylic paint, a layer of oil-based varnish should be applied. And when the varnish dries, but still remains sticky to the touch, cover it on top with a water-based varnish, which also has a cracking effect. After that, the “layer cake” must be dried with a hairdryer so that craquelures appear.