Traditional Graining

There is nothing like the warm "woody" feel of oak panelling, or antique pine doors: wooden surfaces can really glow. Old panelling or doors retain the character and history of a building, whereas new joinery will always look exactly that.

But sometimes even after the laborious job of stripping numerous coats of paint from existing wooden panelling, the resulting timber might not be worth all the effort and expense. Graining is the painted representation of the different timbers used in joinery, and was commonly used in the past to make "cheaper" pine joinery look like it was made of a more expensive hardwood. In many older buildings this inevitably resulted in all doors and skirting boards being simply grained with a sticky brown colour to make them look dark.

But at the other end of the scale, it is a skilled craft which, when done well, can be made to look extremely convincing. Even if the graining looks "painted", it can have a unique hand-crafted quality.

Graining has another useful quality, that of "tying-in" disparate parts of an interior (beams, doors, panels), such as you might find in a pub refurbishment, to unify the look and feel of the place.

I have had a considerable amount of graining experience travelling up and down the country doing the redecoration of Pubs and Bars , as well as large and small projects in private homes. Call me to discuss how graining could bring almost any surface alive.