K R E V E L S T O E L

There’s not a lot of chairs that I really like (and can afford), so the temporary solution of using some chairs my family wanted to get rid off was becoming kind of semi-permanent. The chairs date back from when my dad and his brothers were kids in my grandparents’ house on Krevelhoek. The figures and quotes carved in them are proof they had weren’t any better than I was at their age. Originally, there were 4 red chairs, a blue one and a yellowish off-white one. I don’t like the colour red so I always favoured the two others. I had already trashed a red chair by using it in the bath room. The painted wood couldn’t whitstand the humid air and started to peel away.

When I messed up the off-white one by leaving it outside on a rainy evening, I was a bit sad. Turned out I was more attached to the chairs than I thought I was. I was also quite angry at myself for messing up one of the ‘good’ (read: not red) ones. It then struck me that I could simply get rid of the red by giving the chairs a facelift. I liked the blank wood underneath the peeled paint so I decided to simply sand and varnish the wood and give the steel base some new layers of white paint. Back to basics. With a touch of gold on the wood’s edges because why not. It’s quite subtle yet really gives it a little extra.

I started with one prototype, the off-white chair. I used two different varnishes (whitewash and transparant) because I liked that result the most. Yes, there’s a chair with all kinds of options tested on the bottom. I really liked the result so I decided to do the same with the all red chairs. For the one that had already started peeling it was easy to remove the red paint. For the rest, I needed to sand away the paint first. Red dust everywhere. I was doing this by hand until my dad reminded me he had a tool for sanding, so I went over to parents’ with the wooden parts. Double win, the red dust was now covering their garden instead of mine and it sure was a lot faster than sanding by hand. I ended up taking the sanding machine back with me so I could finish sanding.

Because of the difference in paint, wood, the different ways of sending (manual vs with a machine) ànd the red dust, there’s a visible difference between all finished chairs. I would have thought this would annoy me but I actually really like it.

One backrest is spray painted with the gold I used for the edges. I wanted to see the effect and picked the one with the deepest carvings. As if I preserved some writings from the previous generation in a throne, I simply sprayed two layers of gold over the red paint. The prototype is now the least beautiful one, and more importantly, it doesn’t feel as finished as the others. It isn’t as softly sanded. I might give it another sanding and varnishing round. Oh, and I kept te blue one.

If you were wondering. Yes, I asked my grandfather’s, dad’s and uncles’ approval. Sometime midway my little project. (None of them had any objections, some of them didn’t even know I still had the chairs, all of them are still talking to me.)