SUPERB FRENCH ANTIQUE ROCOCO STYLE PAINTED ARMOIRE

The Rococo style of French antique furniture began in the 18th century. It came about as a result of the Baroque artists of the time casting aside their obsession with symmetry and turning to a more aqueous and lucid style. They began focusing on interiors of palatial French mansions of Louis XV’s reign and into the beginning of Louis XVI’s.

ANTIQUE FRENCH CARVED WOODEN OVERMANTLE MIRROR

The popularity of the Rococo style reached its crescendo in the 1730′s, at this stage its usage had become widespread in French culture and began being used in paintings and sculptures and not just in furniture and architecture. It never caught on in England as it was regarded as too “French”. It did however spread throughout the continent of Europe and became the most popular style of its day, with many palaces in Germany and Portugal being decorated in the Rococo Style.

To this day the style is copied, adapted and reinterpreted in the furniture and interior design world. Original Rococo style items from the 1700′s are rare to find but the majority of Rococo style antiques we deal with here at Frenchfinds, are highly crafted reproductions from the late 1800′s or early 1900′s which are equally beautiful.

STUNNING FRENCH ANTIQUE ROCOCO STYLE TRIPLE DOOR ARMOIRE - C1900

For the most part, Rococo is an exclusively interior style, mainly due to the fact that even for the aristocratic classes, moving back to Paris from the Palaces in the country side, redecorating the exterior of their houses would have proved costly.

STUNNING PAIR OF ANTIQUE FRENCH BEDSIDE TABLES WITH SHELVES - ROCOCO STYLE C.1900

The popularity of Rococo style of French antique furniture has proven to be no surprise whatsoever to us at Frenchfinds as it’s so wonderfully decorative and unique. All of our pieces are original and unique, hand carved with some fantastic detailing each with its own personality imbued through the carver. That distinctive shell-like crest will always stick out like a beacon symbolising style, finesse and universal fashion delicacy.

SUPERB FRENCH ANTIQUE ROCOCO STYLE PINK & WHITE ARMOIRE

Highlighted French Antique Rococo Style Armoire

Lots of people love the different colours we use on our French furniture at FrenchFinds and lately we’ve had a lot of requests for highlighting. Over the years we have painted a lot of french antique furniture ourselves but have also matched bespoke requests. The term ‘highlighting’ is pretty  self-explanatory but for those of you that want to have gain an insight I would be happy to explain with some examples!

French Antique Carved Highlighted Armoire

What is Highlighting?

Highlighting is essentially the use of contrasting colours to bring out a feature, usually a carving or recess, on a piece of french antique furniture. It is generally used when one single solid colour makes a French antique piece of furniture appear too blocky.

There are many forms of highlighting possible the main types are;

• Traditional Highlighting, which is the use of a light colour on top of a dark colour in order to bring a detail, carving or feature to the fore;

• Reverse Highlighting which is the use of a dark colour on top of a light one to achieve the same effect and

• Sumptuous Gilding which is the application of a fine gold or metal leaf on to any solid surface.

Antique French Highlighted Buffet

What French Furniture is Best for Highlighting?

French antique furniture that lends itself to highlighting is usually something which has some kind of detail, carving, columns, raised surfaces or recesses.

Flat simple pieces make it difficult to make the technique work well but occassionally cheeky tricks like using keylines to divide sections of an item can be used.

Our boffins in the Frenchfinds lab have been using these techniques for quite sometime and we’re incredibly pleased with some of their results;

Frenchfinds has been experimenting with a slightly different distressed furniture look. With a little bit of stripper and a lot of elbow grease shiny metal furniture is now slipping silently into our shop. We have tried it out on both French and English, antique and vintage pieces and it seems to work really well. It’s a new alternative for us, away from our traditional ‘shabby chic’ painted style or original wood pieces which is an enjoyable addition to our stock.

From our extra shiny steel & brass office cabinet to the burnished ‘distressed’ gun metal finish of French antique beds, we’re really pleased with the results, here are some of the recent images;

Super Shiny Polished Vintage Steel & Brass Office Cabinet

Burnished & Polished Steel Vintage French Bistro Chairs – Distressed Style

Shiny Burnished / Polished Iron & Brass Antique French Bed

Shiny Polished Steel French Vintage Mini Table / Child’s Desk

Frenchfinds has a constant stream of creative customers with bucketfuls of interesting ideas on how they want a particular antique or vintage piece of furniture finishing.

Upholstery Inspiration

Recently, we have had lots of fantastic antique and vintage French beds reupholstered for clients in a multitude of different ways.

The variety of fabrics that have been chosen shows the wonderful versatility of using fabric as a decorative tool. To give you a peak of our latest projects and provide inspirations for your own projects here are the before and after shots.

1920′s gilded frame French corbeille bed

This was a really nice project to work on as it put the life back into a beautiful but rare bed for Troughton Creations who specialise in a whole range of high level interior and garden design work.

Before

Simple original calico & hessian covering on the foot and headboard. The side rails retained their original embroidered silk finish.

After

Covered in Designers’ Guild ‘Mezzola Lusso’ Heather – deep buttonned with a double piping finish

We tested a new approach with a brilliant Farrow & Ball ‘Raddicio Red’ undercoat on this antique bamboo washstand.

We then gave it a top coat of satin black and distressed it heavily to give a show through.

Set off with the white marble top we’re really pleased with the results – see what you think!

MNEVAMS4KUN3

The excitement and warm feeling that you get

from meeting, speaking to and making friends with a wonderful number of French people.

The ability to indulge in a very relaxed country steeped in a wide array of  philosophy, art, culture, food and beautiful

countryside.

It is great, hard work, occasionally gritty but great. But every so often even great and glamorous jobs can test your dedication…

This test came the other day at one of our classic antique fairs where we buy many of our French antique beds and armoires and other French furniture. Despite being 100s of miles south of the frosty frozen UK 5 inches of snow greeted us on our arrival.  A first in 10 years that we’ve bought in the area.

The show usually attended by 1000s this time appeared more like a desolate wasteland out of a post-apocolyptic nouvelle-vague film.

Despite joy of a genuine dark rich espresso (or 5), a 5am start, deep snow and severely frost bitten bits of anatomy didn’t quite equate to the glamour most people anticipate of buying French antique furniture.

Never-the-less dedication, or is that addiction, to buying these beloved French antiques pushed us through to the end with some really great purchases. We have just about thawed out!

Most of the French antique furniture Frenchfinds supplies are from the late 1800s or early 1900s.  Almost all of these items are made in certain in style harking back to definitive earlier periods of French furniture design.

From the 1830s, starting with Gothic and Rococo revivals, it became more and more popular to reinvent these styles to fit the tastes of the day. As tastes blended and fashions became more mixed up, motifs from eras cross-fertilised the craftmanship changing furniture from true reproductions to interpretations to please clients of the time.

In order to help understand these categories we have put together a quick guide to the antique French furniture styles we sell. Below are the first 3 categories in the series – Rococo, Henri II and Louis XVI.

Provencal, Napolean III, Empire, Louis XV, Louis XIII, Breton and Louis Phillipe styles will be covered in forthcoming posts.

Rococo

Rococo style furniture, is mimicking furniture of the time associated with the Régence and the reign of Louis XV (1715 – 1774). It is recognisable by its almost Italian flamboyance, a signature roceille or Rococo shell crest, cabriolet legs that curvaciously kick out and spiral escargot (snail) feet. Wikipedia has a great overview of the Rococo period here.

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Henri II

Harking back to Henri II reign of 1519 – 1559, these revival pieces are an antithesis to the Rococo style. Usually, very straight, simple, block like with geometric patterns and often with some kind of column, the carving is heavy as is the type/colour of wood used. Some revival pieces combine more decorative carvings such as a simple crest with the masculine square shape of the French furniture, the torch and quiver is a familiar motif within this style.

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Louis XVI

Aping furniture from approx 1774-1792 the Louis XVI style is a balance between the square lines of Henri II, the decorative flurries of the Rococo style and sometimes the romanesque/greek like Empire styles. Swags, flowers, bows and delicate carvings are framed by strong symmetrical box frames, simple lines and repeating tessellated patterns. A variety of our beds come under the Louis XVI style banner and can vary from using cane and intricately molded plasterwork to upholstered to wooden beds. A central theme appears to be the use of a carved flower within a square usually on the join between the foot or head board and the side rails.

Lots of people love the aged, old, battered, shabby chic look on French furniture, something that gives the piece a used feeling to it.

For those antique furniture items that do not already have this with it, either because they are too new or they are too pristine, the look can be created in lots of different ways. The term used for making something look older or more worn, is one I absolutely adore, it is called ‘distressing’. Hence, I often end up asking the intriguing question to a customer, “how distressed would you like your French armoire/buffet/bed?”.

This is not a new phenomenon, items that were old in the late 1800′s were made to look even older by bashing coal into them, smacking them with bags of stone and artistically abusing them with a range of different stains.

Rubbing painted furniture down to give nicks and wear is one of Frenchfinds specialities and something that is very popular. However, distressing antiques and vintage furniture is a really subjective activity. Having distressed many items over the last 8 years and to varying specifications we have come up with what we reckon as a standardised scale of distress!

See below for examples and photos of distressed French furniture…

Here’s the original

1) Light distress

Small nicks on corners or features of a piece only through to the undercoat

2) medium distress

More numerous nicks and wear on edges and features. A mix of some through to the undercoat and others through to the wood

3) heavy distress

Wear comprehensively across the whole piece of furniture. Features and edges definitively worn. Heavy application taking the paint off through to the wood in most instances, occasionally showing undercoat.

4) knackered!

The item is really stripped of its coat. Usually, this works best with something that has had several to many coats of paint applied.

By building up different coloured paint layers underneath the piece of French antique furniture, you can end up with a real interesting range of colours as you deliberately ware it away again. This can be done either by sanding it down with different levels of force or by removing layers with paint strippers such as Nitromorse.

Picking a complementary colour for the undercoat to the top layer e.g. pink and grey you can subliminally reinforce colour schemes by distressing the furniture.

Make it look dirty!

By using a dark wax to finish a piece, bright colours can be dulled down and changed to give it a dirty (yet clean) finish. Quite often this can help to bring out the pattern of the wood underneath adding to the piece.

Combining a heavy distressing and a dark wax finish you can create a really nice old worn feel to an item.

Antiques green alternative to buying new

Antiques are no longer brown, white or any other colour! They’re green!

Buying an antique or vintage piece rather than a new reproduction can save as much as 537kg of carbon dioxide emissions (the equivalent weight of 6 fully grown men).

Antiques 10 times better than new

Figures to indicate how much better for the environment antique & vintage furniture is compared to new furniture has been hard to come by but several articles have popped up recently to highlight this.

Nigel Worboys, a Beaconsfield Antique Dealer quoted in the Antiques Trade Gazette and This is Bristol.co.uk on the launch of a new green initiative says,

“The carbon footprint from antiques’ original production expired a long time ago, and their continued existence has been testament to a life cycle of at least 10 times an equivalent modern item,”

According to an article in the independent, having had one life already, it is carbon neutral after one owner, let alone the 10 quoted by Nigel.

One restorer in the US even puts it at 1000 times more efficient than new products although this seems a little high.

New products in the CO2 heavy weight category

More specifically Do the greenthing.com’s article indicates that an average of 0.78kg Carbon Dioxide is emitted per pound spent on a new item (averaging across CDs, pieces of furniture or electrical items).

Therefore, for your average reproduction double door armoire that would equate to approximately 584kg of carbon dioxide emitted (equalling approximately 4 times its own weight) and this is even before delivery to the customer.

…and not forgetting landfill

Carbon dioxide is not the only saving as the effects of landfill for items also has a major effect. Assuming a small piece of furniture weighs 10 kg, this saves approximately 15 kg of carbon contained within the piece. It also saves  the time and energy taken to break it up or put it through a recycling process turning it into a reconstituted wood product.

Do the greenthing.com also quotes an Envirowise report that shows in today’s manufacturing industries, around 93% of the raw materials used to fabricate the items that we buy in our daily lives are wasted.  Only about 7% of these materials actually find their way into retail products.

Frenchfinds environmentally friendlier

Taking into account Frenchfinds.co.uk sourcing journeys to France and resources used for restoration, the average carbon dioxide generated per piece is approximately 20kg.

The average CO2 cost per piece for delivery direct to our customers (an average of 160 miles + a return journey) is 27kg.

So 47kg of Co2 emissions vs 584kg – a no brainer?

Wherever you purchase an antique, vintage or second hand item, even before you even consider the beauty of it, envinronmentally it just seems to makes sense.

One joy of French antique furniture is that is unique. The one infuriating thing about French antique furniture is that is unique! It is almost impossible to find an identical piece but we find many pieces that match a particular popular styles.

Frenchfinds is very happy to try and find pieces for whatever you may be craving for, direct from France (if it isn’t already on the Frenchfinds website). We cover some big areas of France with lots of contacts and friends we have built up over the last 15 years of getting to love the country and its beautiful styles.

Let us know the size, style, colour(s), and any other key information and we will do our utmost best to make your wishes come true.

You can contact us direct on 01538 370058 (UK) or frenchfinds@yahoo.co.uk