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Why Do We Paint Windsor Chairs? And other goodies. Recently someone who follows this website as if it were a religion was worried that by painting Antique Chairs, the value would be next to nothing. Well I think that this article explains it best.
Folks online tend to get in a tizzy when it comes time to paint my Windsor chairs because they want to see me “stain or oil the natural wood.” But here’s why we paint Windsor chairs…
If the chair were a single species of wood, or two species that made for a beautiful contrast (like maple and walnut, for example), I’d be right there with them loving those natural wood tones and being wary of covering them up.
I generally steer clear of stains of any kind though, because call me a purist, but I want the wood I’m using to build to look like the wood I’m using. Pine just can’t passably be made to look like walnut and vise versa. But I digress.
The real reason we paint Windsor chairs is because that’s how they were traditionally finished. That’s in big part because they’re made from three white-ish (in color) species of wood that are too similar in color to contrast well, and yet too dissimilar in texture and pore structure to oil without the chair ending up looking, well, tacky.
Types Of Wood Used For Windsor Chairs
MAPLE
The smooth maple used for the legs, rockers, and armposts is used because of its rock-hard nature; it can stand up to the abuse of leaning and tipping that is common in chairs. Maple’s ability to show crisper turning details and take a really nice finish right off the lathe tool with little to no sanding is definitely a plus when it comes to production turning (think of having to turn 56 baluster style chair components for a set of 8 chairs). Maple develops a nice natural polish with oil and tends to stay pretty “white” in color, though it does “yellow” and darken over time.
PINE
The seat of a Windsor chair is pine, which grows big enough to make solid seat blanks, is soft enough to carve and it also tends to compress around the harder wood components during the joining process, making for tighter, longer-lasting joints. Pine soaks up a lot of oil initially, giving it a more immediate “yellow” tone with oil.
OAK
The spindles and chair backs are traditionally made from white or red oak, which is a really stringy, porous wood. Oak, however, grows really straight and tends to split really well, giving us the opportunity to get really thin, refined-looking spindles that have some “give” as you sit in the chair, but retain the full-grain strength of the tree within their length, so that “give” doesn’t result in “snaps” as you lean back in the chair.
Were we to use maple for the spindles, we’d be forced to leave the spindles much thicker which would make for a much more “top-heavy” looking chair. Red oak gets very red as it ages, and white oak turns more of an amber color when oiled.
Now the several antique and reproduction chairs are made of the 3 different wood. To stain them would just ruin them and the value of the chairs would be cut by 90% if I were to sell them.
