Thistledown Nest in Marshfield is home to furniture restoration artist
MARSHFIELD – Christine Clarke has invested many years honing style and maker techniques across a lot of disciplines, from portray and sculpting to upholstery and lost-wax casting.
Just about every of her assorted abilities can be noticed during Thistledown Nest, her workshop and showroom on Webster Avenue, from completed merchandise to those just now getting new like and care.
A Kingston indigenous, Clarke returned to the South Shore with her daughter very last yr from California’s Bay Area, in which she was sole proprietor of a attractive painting and structure follow.
In a transfer that she explained as incredibly strange for her, she rented the place she now occupies at 844 Webster St. unseen. Formerly a yoga studio, she promptly got to operate transforming the purple, pink and mild blue room into the great house for furniture restoration.
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“I had a vision and I just went to work,” Clarke said. “I did it mostly all myself. I didn’t provide a total lot of stuff with me from California, so I just received to operate.”
No traces of the earlier tenant remains. The place has reverted to a rustic industrial style, with all focus focused on the intricate items décor Clarke breathes new lifetime into.
Even the structural columns in the room act as component of her portfolio. Earlier vivid and colorful, Clarke hand painted the vertical beams with a wooden grain style indistinguishable from the true matter.
Providing vintage pieces new, modern day life
Many people with very good excellent household furniture have experienced it handed down from former generations and you should not know what to do with the parts, Clarke explained. They can be uncomfortable and out of day, or merely do not match the model of the existing owners’ place.
“People today have pieces that are beautiful but no 1 wants them since it is filled with horse hair, it is not cozy,” Clarke claimed. “It can be all dusty and dirty and it’s too dim and large for modern homes.”
A lot of of these items have sentimental price, she stated, and even though folks really don’t want to get rid of them, they will not know how to incorporate them into their lives. That’s where Clarke comes in.
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“What I seriously like to do is completely transform classic things, furnishings with superior bones,” she explained. “Folks like points light and vibrant, with additional hues, extra brightness. The aged household furniture that is hand carved and fantastically built just looks so large.”
Clarke is in a position to pull from her decades of knowledge to identify the very best means to refinish or repurpose clients’ parts, from stripping down the complete and applying a new stain or paint shade to full re-upholstery with modern day elements, molding and replacing lacking trim or design and style aspects. She can also add decorative painting to match other elements in the space the piece will reside in.
“You do have to be thorough, due to the fact not each piece of household furniture is value that substantially elbow grease, but a whole lot are,” she explained. “When you have some thing which is built of wooden that is good and hand carved, let’s preserve it out of the landfill, because it is superior than the sawdust that you are shopping for from Wayfair.”
From restoration pupil to grasp
Considering that obtaining her BFA from the Massachusetts College or university of Art and Style and design, Clarke has used several years doing the job in the household style and design area, and her function can be viewed across the nation and even internationally.
She started off out as a decorative painter, a job that led her to working in murals, bronze foundry, sculpting, mildew generating, restoration and attractive furniture work, as effectively as missing-wax casting, a system of metal casting in which a molten metal is poured into a mold that has been established by suggests of a wax model. She also restored and refitted antique picture frames, items of artwork and upholstery.
She said she is especially attracted to “the aged planet skill of it all.”
Her time as a muralist included operate at the Breakers Mansions in Newport, Rhode Island multiple casinos in Las Vegas P.F. Chang restaurants and a hotel casino in Dubai.
Settling in on the South Shore
Clarke mentioned she has been hectic with customer perform because opening officially in October 2021, and is preferably working on a two- to 3-month guide time. The model people today want in their households right here differs from Californians, she said, and she’s rapidly adapting to this modify.
“I am trying to figure out what the location desires to see and how I can most effective provide what men and women want,” she explained. “I hope to develop into a small business that sustains not just me, but a few of other artisans and delivers a provider that folks take pleasure in.”
To see more examples of Clarke’s do the job, check out thistledownnest.com.