Decorative painting & restoration in Pasadena

Between the Craftsman houses of the Arroyo, the Spanish Colonial Revival stock south of Colorado, and the civic architecture around the Civic Center, Pasadena has an unusual amount of surviving original decorative work — and an unusual amount of it buried under later repainting.

That makes investigation worth doing here more often than almost anywhere else in the county. Cutting exposure windows in a 1910s dining room or a 1920s stair hall very frequently finds stencilled friezes, glazed panelling or grained woodwork that nobody knew was there. It costs a fraction of a repaint and it changes what the room can be.

We work throughout Pasadena on both sides of that: conservation and colour designation for period interiors and civic buildings, and new decorative commissions — murals, gilding, plaster and painted ornament — for houses where the original scheme is gone and something has to be designed rather than recovered.

The San Gabriel Mission Playhouse, a short distance east, is among the auditorium interiors we have worked on; the studio itself has been based in the Crescenta Valley, immediately north, for decades.