OMBRE COFFEE TABLE
Fresh paint can give new life to favourite piece of furniture
Furniture shopping is a pain: it’s expensive, it’s awkward to carry and finding the colour that you want can be difficult.
Quality is also an issue, especially since so much furniture is made of fragile particleboard.
If you’re going to invest, you want it to last a while.
But what if you already have good quality pieces, or find them at vintage or second-hand stores, but they just don’t fit in?
Whether it’s an old, worn-out chesterfield, a $5 Value Village coffee table or a mismatched piece already in your home, the easiest way to give new life to a piece of furniture is to give it a coat of paint.
You can keep it simple with one colour or use techniques to achieve aged or distressed looks.
And if you want a no-hassle product, check out Chalk Paint decorative Paint by Annie Sloan.
Here’s a short DIY project to refresh an old coffee table from Annie Sloan’s book, Annie Sloan Paints Everything.
OMBRE COFFEE TABLE
Ombre means “shaded” in French, and the gradual blending of colours on pieces of furniture seems to be a crossover idea from the world of fashion, where hair or clothes are dipped into a dye to change their colour.
Furniture painted in this way is sometimes also called ombre or dipped, and refers to pieces where the colour changes gradually from one to the other. It’s usually the legs of the piece that are treated in this way, since they lend themselves easily to the technique.
The colours should merge seamlessly, so choose colours that work well together when they are mixed. I chose two colours near each other on the colour wheel to be sure they would look good when blended.
Many people opt for a colour with white, so that the colour made in between is a pastel.
Some colour combinations are less successful, however. Choosing, say, blue and yellow means you’d have a band of green in between, which would be distracting.
This little table is fairly featureless, but I thought I would draw
attention to the legs, which are sweetly pointy.
Although the technique looks easy, it was quite difficult to achieve on this particular table because the legs are angled. Rounded legs would have been easier to paint.