About Women At Work - Creative & Decorative Painting

Women at Work, Creative Painting & Decorating has been offering a full range of decorating and painting services since February 1999.

We specialize in customizing your personal living space to suit your distinctive personality and décor.

We take pride in our attention to detail and top quality workmanship and use only top quality products.

Friday, April 14, 2000.
By Susan Balcom, Vancouver Sun

The (faux) Finishing Touch

Given a free hand to paint an all white condo, Women at Work came up with an imaginative, sophisticated look in easy-to-live colours.

From the minute he moved into his all white condo overlooking English Bay, Frank Broeders knew he wanted to paint the walls. But what colour? And where to begin in a 780-square-foot space where pretty well every room can be seen from the living room?

"I wanted a place that's masculine. But not so masculine that a woman wouldn't feel comfortable," he says.

Broeders, a bachelor, wanted to individualize his new home. But he had no idea how to create the distinctive "look" that home decorating magazines talk about. Stumped, he did nothing for almost a year. Then, he met artists Susan Picard and Marla Infanti at the B.C. Fall Home Show. The two, who are sisters, specialize in painting techniques like faux finishing. As well, their company, Women at Work, helps homeowners with colour selection, furniture placement and picture hanging.

Broeders gave Picard and Infanti free rein to paint his suite, using whatever techniques they thought would look best. The only condition was that they keep in mind the condo might be sold in the future, so the walls couldn't be too wild.
The result is an imaginative and sophisticated look in colours that most people would find easy to live with. The job took the two women five days to complete, and cost about $2000. "Even my parents, who are quite conservative, like it," Broeders says.

Picard and Infanti began by choosing paint based on the colours of Broeders' furniture and accessories.

Frank Broeders of English Bay, met artists Susan Picard and Marla Infanti at the B.C. Fall Home Show.

The living room has a brick red leather couch and chair, with dark green accent pillows. Most of the other furniture in this room is black (the stereo, dinette suite and occassional tables.) "For the living room, we wanted something that was livable and would be calming," says Picard, an avid fan of Debbie Travis' television show The Painted House.

To accomplish this, and to complement the red furniture, a greyed sage green paint was applied to the walls. The largest wall was "ragged" to give it a marble-like finish; the others were painted normally, using a roller. In the kitchen, which has white appliances, the walls were painted normally, using a roller, the walls were painted a taupey-champagne colour, accented by a wide band of black at the ceiling.

In the powder room, the team painted black vertical stripes on the lower half of the walls. The technique is called shadow striping and is created by painting stripes of high-gloss paint over a flat latex of the same colour.
The upper half of the walls is brick red, framed by a thin band of black at the ceiling.

It's a mistake to think you must use the same colour scheme in every room to create continuity, Picard says, "as long as you have one colour that links the spaces." In Broeders' condo, black and grey are the common colours, combined with green, champagne and brick red.