An Enchanted Dining Room

One of the more interesting residential projects we've completed in the past few years was this dining room for a townhouse on the upper West side of Manhattan, just off the Hudson River.  The townhouse was being completely renovated by the owners, and they brought us on board to create a landscape mural for the dining room. 

Conceptually, the owner's idea for the space was to create a landscape mural in the room that would bring some of the magic and mystery of the forest into the experience of the room.  At night, lit by fireplace and candles, one might be able to imagine that one has set up dinner in the clearing of a verdant landscape.  During the day, the landscape would bring a sense of life and space and color to the room.

The architecture of the room was established when we started on the project.  The walls smoothly curved up into the ceiling with no break and there were some existing columns at the the doors to the adjacent parlor.  The dining room is on the third floor of the townhouse, and a curving staircase with a beautiful wrought iron railing transitions through the space on the east side of the room.

An early concept for the room was to base the landscape on the paintings of the Hudson River School, a style of painting notable for it's luminous light and drama.  The image above was an early sample, but it was fast apparent that the approach wasn't going to work for this room.  The images were often too dramatic, and when doing landscape murals in a residential setting like this, you want the mural to be a secondary character, not the focus of attention.  You want to enjoy the beauty the artwork brings to a room and have guests enjoy it, but the mural's role should be clearly subservient - it sets a tone of beauty and elegance and than fades to the background.  Given this, we knew we needed to try a new approach. (Click thumbnails for enlarged photos)

We did continue to use some Hudson River Valley scenes as a compositional foundation, but ultimately we went with a much lighter 'spring' look, and eliminated some of the more overly dramatic elements we had at first considered. The picture on the left showed an early sample of this new approach.  In addition to changing the palette significantly, we also used an 'alla prima' technique, where colors are applied directly to the substrate, skipping the traditional 'underpainting' technique we usually use to  get the drawing and structure of a mural into place.

The switch in palette and technique brought a great sense of lightness and space to the mural, but their was still something missing.

Studying some of Gustav Klimpt's landscapes, our lead artist was inspired to add some metallic pigment powders into the paints - golds, silvers, and coppers - and it was these subtle metallic effects that really brought the mural into the finished state. You don't notice the metallics in the room at a quick viewing of it, but when lit by the flickering flames of a candle, the metallics catch the light and make it sparkle in a very subtle way as you move around the room.

In addition to painting the mural on the walls, we also did a sky that also incorporated subtle warm golden glazes.

This project was a lot of work, and took a lot of time, but the end result was quite stunning - a project that both our clients and us are proud of!

Following are a few "before and after photos" so you can see more of the room as it was transformed by our enchanted forest scene.