It came to us broken. Two tiers, cabinet doors on top, a bank of drawers underneath, and a finish that had gone tired years before anybody gave up on it.
We took it for boring reasons. The bones were good. The vertical detailing on the doors was better than anything you would find on a new piece that size. And the inside was already divided more or less the way a bar wants to be divided, so we could change what it looked like without fighting what it was.
This was for the Furniture Bank of Metro Detroit's first Furniture Flip Challenge, a fundraiser that puts discarded furniture in front of people and asks them to make something of it. Over a hundred entries came in that year. I will admit I went into it a little sideways, because Britney & Co. designs new homes and large renovations, which means I spend most of my working life specifying things and almost none of it holding a sander.
What we did to it
Cleaned it, sanded it lightly, pulled the doors and the hardware. There is nothing to say about that stage except that it takes longer than you plan for on a Saturday (multiple Saturdays).
Then the color, and this is where it got interesting. We went with a rich saturated green, deep enough to read nearly black in a dim room. What surprised me was what it did to the doors. On the old finish those vertical grooves had gone invisible. Under the green they read like millwork.
The mirrored back panel is the part I would have talked a client out of. Peel and stick mirror, applied to the inside back of the upper cabinet, which is a material I have spent years quietly looking down on.
It is the best decision in the whole piece.
The inside of that cabinet now feels considerably deeper than it is, and every glass on the shelf picks up light it has no business picking up. I have thought about that one more than I expected to.
After the mirror: a faux marble surface across the working top for mixing and serving, and a stemware rack mounted underneath the upper shelf, in brass. Then the hardware. The original drawer pulls were ornate in the way that dates a piece the moment you walk in the room, and they came off in favor of brass and acrylic. That swap on its own moved the armoire twenty years forward.
And then it sold.
That is the part that stayed with me. The challenge ends in a bash, the finished pieces go up, people bid on them, and the money goes back into what the Furniture Bank does, which is put furniture into homes that do not have any. Tim from the Furniture Bank emailed a few days afterward to tell me the bar had found a buyer. I have had work photographed in far more impressive circumstances and enjoyed it less.
Mostly what I took from it is that I am too quick to write furniture off. I will tell a client to replace something in a heartbeat, and I did not fully understand until I was standing over a broken armoire with a sanding block how much of what makes a piece good is already in it before anybody touches it.
So if you have something in a basement with decent bones and a finish you cannot live with, I am the wrong designer to tell you to get rid of it. Tell me what you are looking at.(https://www.britneyandco.com/contact)
