Custom Makeover – Edwardian Shabby Chic Bureau

by Touch the Wood

As you may know, we do custom works as well. This Bureau was painted and make in Shabby Chic style to order for one lovely lady in Devon. I hope it will match her living room with a huge window with a view of the sea.
This piece was very big, more than 2 meters high. It was made of solid wood, in fairy good condition.
At first we wanted to leave most of interior unpainted, revealing original beauty of it, but then Susie contacted as and we followed her instructions.
She wanted to make it match the colour of her living room, which is creamy white, and as reference she gave us two colours chosen by her, it was Farrow and Ball’s ‘French Grey’ and ‘Bone’. She wanted to use lighter colour for interior.

custom makeover edwardian shabby chic bureau, shabby chic

Since we usually work with Annie Sloan’s paints, we proposed to match the colours using chalk paints. Susie didn’t mind.

To achieve desirable effect we used green-ish ‘Chateau Grey’ and yellow-ish ‘Old Ochre’ with two different proportions: for interior lighter colour it was 1 portion of ‘Chateau Grey’ mixed with 8 portions of ‘Old Ochre’, and for darker outside it was 1 ‘Chateau Grey’ x 2 ‘Old Ochre’.

The result you can see on one of the pictures, you can see there samples of Farrow and Ball’s colours on a background of our work.