Some Interior Decorating
So, how do you decorate a 1930’s era apartment? Well, I went with a wallpaper look above and below the chair rail.
First, I painted the background a peach colour. Below the chair rail, I tried something a bit different with stripes. Some years ago when I painted our dining room, I was talking with a professional painter and he was suggesting that I create a striped pattern by first painting the wall and then masking off stripes and painting the exposed surface with a urethane gloss. I thought this was a bit odd, but he had done this in several homes and really liked the effect. Although I didn’t follow his advice for our dining room, I did try this on the interior of this apartment.
After evenly spacing some trimmed masking tape, I brushed on a matte urethane because I was afraid that a gloss would be too shiny. As is often the case when you apply urethane to an acrylic, the colour darkened and “richened.” The result is quite nice.
Above the chair rail, I used a wallpaper pattern that I found on the web. I just printed it off to the scale that I was looking to get and cut through the pattern with the point of a sharp blade. With that stencil, now, I was able to dry brush some burgundy colour through the stencil and onto the upper wall in a repeating pattern.
The overall look came out just right, I think. Notice that I added some brown staining here and there to set it off.
tributesinwood 