Making Something New Old Again

If you’ve ever looked at an antique piece of furniture and a piece of distressed furniture side by side, you may not have been able to tell the difference.

If done correctly, distressing is an artistic skill that can make any piece of furniture look as if it has been in circulation for 100 years of more.

While it may seem easy to age a piece of furniture by abusing it, there really is an art to it, much like making a movie prop. In skilled hands, the piece will look natural. In the hands of an amateur, it’ll look like it should be on its way to the thrift shop.

There is a long list of techniques used to create a perfectly distressed piece of furniture.

First, the distress artist is given the piece of furniture. It if is meant to have a wood finish, they will then use a number of tools to simply age the wooden piece. Among the tools in their arsenal are hammers, fire, rasps, nails, and sometimes a bag filled with bolts. When the artist first looks at the piece they have to decide where the item would naturally experience wear and tear over time. If they have a cabinet piece, they would likely use the rasp to wear down some of the smooth edges on the door and a hammer or bag of bolts to hit the surface, leaving behind dings and dents that naturally occur over time.

For white distressed furniture, the wood is distressed and given a whitewash. Sometimes the whitewash will be a little uneven or will be rubbed as it dries to add another layer of age and use. Another option is to use a crackle finish on the paint that makes it seem as if the paint is very old and cracking in place.

In distressed painted furniture, the colorful appearance of the furniture is made to look many years older through fly specking (splashing dark dots of paint to the wood), or adding streaks of dark stain or paint on the surface. Some are given a crackle finish showing a second layer of paint underneath the cracking surface, for a deeper effect.