Actually not a collection but a vehicle to hold some of my lily-of-the-valley pieces.  That collection deserves a very long post so I’ll save that for later. What I wanted to talk about today, in a short post, is the breakfront where I display some of this particular collection.

I have never really liked this piece, but find it a necessity to hold china, silver flatware and linens so it stays!  It has three sections to its top part all covered with glass fronted doors.  I decided to remove the center doors (2 of them) and open it up so the pieces on the shelves would be showpieces.  All of the areas are electrified which was a blessing.  I took out the glass shelves, thoroughly cleaned it and decided that I wanted to “gild” it!  I originally thought I would do gold leaf, it isn’t a huge area but soon realized that it would be very time consuming and expensive.  Off I went to one of my favorite stores, The Home Depot, to see what they had that I could use.  Of course, Ralph Lauren had anticipated my needs and had several metallic paints for me to choose from.  In addition to several shades of gold, there was silver and bronze.  I picked a gold that I thought would replicate the look of gold leafing….yes, it does exactly that but I needed to do six coats to satisfy myself!  Very easy to apply but after the fourth and fifth coats, this took a week to accomplish, I was ready to toss everything!  I didn’t, of course, and am thrilled with the results.  I decided to only do the center of the breakfront leaving the other two sections in their natural wood state…both of those are also filled with the lily-of-the-valley collection.  I have enough paint to do those if and when I decide to do so.

Photo done beautifully by Christine Hawley. The breakfront is finished here, I added more books and rearranged a bit from the photo below. A guest asked why I have books there, seriously, does that person know me at all, I don’t think so!!!! You are seeing the wall, the far end of my apartment, of my sitting area, fireplace is off camera to the right of the chair. More bookshelves and art.  The paisley shaded lamp is in front of wall of windows that stretch across the entire width of my home.

A close up taken by me, you can see I’m not a pro like Christine…but you can get an idea of the look of the piece and can see the glow of the gold paint.  The wonderful watercolor of lily-of-the-valley, at the center of the top of the breakfront, was painted for me for a Birthday years ago by my talented friend, Mark Heister, no end to his creativity!  Lucky me!

Have you ever gold leafed or gilded anything?  What was your result?  How do you display your collections?  Do share.