Faux Real? by Joseph Pubillones on Creators.com

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Faux Real?

Some interior designers and homeowners cringe when they hear the words "faux finish." Others don't. However, decorative paint finishes have been around since the beginning of time. As a matter of fact, our predecessors, the cavemen, sketched on the walls of their earthly abodes scenes from their everyday lives, and those are now our only records of their time and history. The ancient civilizations of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all embellished their homes and public buildings with paintings depicting daily scenes, religious figures and decorative motifs.

Trompe-l'oeil, faux finishes and other decorative paint finishes have been used extensively and have fallen in and out of favor since their peak of popularity during the Renaissance to the 1950s and 1960s, when the modern art movement moved away from this art form. During the 1970s, '80s and '90s, with a renewed interest in traditional architecture and the development of the McMansion, faux finishes and murals gained a new audience and popularity. For a period of time in our recent past, there was hardly an interior design project that didn't have some form of decorative painting even in ubiquitous spaces such as the laundry room and the garage. To those who shrug every time the subject is mentioned and think that decorative finishes will go away, well ... it's just not going to happen.

Herein lies the problem with faux finishes. How many of us have seen a room that looks like baby poop has been smeared on the walls? (Sorry, babies!) It's just not attractive, not cute. Most of these rooms that take your breath away have been done by weekend warriors, the DIY crowd.

My best advice is that this is one area of interior design that is best left to the professionals. Decorative painting is tricky in and of itself, even at the hands professional decorative painters, artists or faux finishers.

Professional decorative painters will have a portfolio of past work for you to look through prior to committing to them. It's important that you look through the many projects in their portfolio and perhaps ask them to take you to see one that you like. True decorative painters will have an arsenal of techniques, paints and equipment to create your projects. It is not unusual to ask the decorative painter to make you small samples of the suggested finishes as part of the selection process.

Dragging, strie faux painting, stippling, sponging, ragging, marbling and stenciling are just some of the techniques of decorative painting. Popular finishes today include Venetian plaster, tone-on-tone stripes, textures and scenic murals. Besides their decorative role, faux finishes can be used to remedy or reconcile architectural flaws. For example, adding a doorway to balance out a room and give the room symmetry and painting a window in a windowless powder room are good examples of how to use a decorative finish in an architectural way.

Decorative painting can make your dreams come virtually true. My suggestion is that you choose one or two places at most to paint so that your faux finish doesn't turn out to be a faux pas.

Joseph Pubillones is the owner of Joseph Pubillones Interiors, an award-winning interior design firm based in Palm Beach, Fla. To find out more about Joseph Pubillones, or to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.