Fine Decorative Finishes

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Faux real?   Muncie couple and business owners are experts at faux finishing.  
By Nancy Millard

An age-weathered world map on Eric Wilson’s study ceiling is exposed by crumbled plaster, like a relic from an Italian Renaissance home.  The walls are a rich, Van Dyke brown “leather”, in keeping with the Old World Charm.

Donna and Brad Harris created the faux décor in the Daleville house that Wilson built.  They have also enhanced other local homes with faux stone and brick archways, mellowed wood doors and even marble columns based on PVC pipes.

“During construction, the Harris’s also decorated other rooms, including the living room, the stairwell to the basement and an accent wall in the master bedroom,” said Raychelle Wilson.  “The powder room is really neat.  The walls are faux suede with bronze accents over the top.  I absolutely love it.”

The Harris’s have enhanced other local homes using the same techniques.

Recently, they opened New Creations Fine Decorative Finishes, their showroom at 3404 N. Wheeling Ave., where they’ve transformed a simple white sales room into vignettes of their faux arts.  The marble columns, for instance, that Donna is working on is a fool-the-eye replica worthy of the U.S. Capitol.

Donna and Brad Harris, the creative entrepreneurs, for into the decorating business back in the early 1980’s when she offered to paint the walls of a hair salon where she worked in Anderson.  “I had done some metallic rag rolling (patterning wet paint by rolling crushed bags on it for texture) for my family and friends,” she said.

“Everybody liked what I had done at the hair salon.  I started getting offers.  That was my billboard,” she said with a laugh.  “Brad helped me with scaffold projects.  It wasn’t six months until we quit our jobs.”

They honed their art in classes at Martin Allen Hirsch’s Decorative Studio in Louisville.

“I was awed.  I thought it was a most cool thing to turn a plain steel door into wood grain good enough to fool the people.  The brick an marble looked so real,”  she exclaimed.

In the dozens or so years while the Harris’s have transformed homes and businesses into exotic places, they’ve developed professionally both in skill an the durability of their products.

“Most of the products we use are made by company in Vero Beach, Fla.,” she pointed out.  “Instead of oil paints, we now use water-based products with lox VOC content an 90-percent interior rated for external use.  However, Indiana environmental conditions are unpredictable for exterior use of the products.  We need slow drying between coats.”

Where do you start if you want to try a faux decoration in your home?  “In your favorite room, where you spend most of your time.  Otherwise, you’ll want to spend time in the room you make over,”  said Donna.

For starters, she suggested a bathroom.  “We can match tiles (using a wood base) or build a brick archway over the tub,” she suggested.

In the kitchen, instead of pulling out the laminate counters, they can create faux granite or stone with a surface that’s durable, won’t fade and is chemical and alcohol resistant.

And if you want to add marble columns to define your living room, instead of costly, heavy marble, how about polished faux marble on plain wood or even a PVC pipe?