My client Ed recently called with a fun challenge. Ed is the owner of Nirvana Tea House & Café (a fantastic café by the way!!), where I have done other mural and decorative finish projects. Nirvana was adding seating in a room adjacent to the main café area, and Ed wanted to give this new space its own unique vibe. He had a vision for the finish he wanted – describing it as something like gold leaf, but with bigger patches of textured shapes to reflect the light off the gold finish. He didn’t have any images of something he had seen before – just the idea he had in his head… Which is exactly why this was so much fun! Creating a new finish or look is one of my favorite things to do.
When Ed described what he wanted, I had a picture in my head – and describing this in more detail back to him helped us pin down that I was on the right track. With a good understanding of Ed’s vision, I was on to figuring out how to produce this and creating a sample board. With a light plaster product as the base, I used different tools to create overlapping shapes in multiple different textures, and then applied metallic gold over the surface to create the reflections. I met with Ed in the new space to him my concept and he loved it!
With that, I was on to creating the final finish on a much larger scale. To balance with the size of the walls, I used bigger shapes than I had on my concept board. As I planned out the patterns, my goal was to keep the end effect looking balanced, while still having a random patchwork effect. Once the texture was done and the gold applied, Ed and I talked about lighting to enhance the look created by the reflections – and Ed followed up by installing directional lights. The effect is exactly what Ed was looking for. Below is a picture of the final result – or better yet, you can go and check it out at Nirvana Tea House & Café in Millis, MA!
Enjoy!!
Jason
