Restoring Belmont’s Grand Salon

In 1850, Joseph and Adelicia Acklen commissioned what would become the largest house in antebellum Tennessee. Belmont was just the couple’s summer residence and was built on the crest of a prominent hill outside Nashville. The estate was just over 175 acres and boasted numerous outbuildings, including an art gallery, a bowling alley, a greenhouse, and various cages for exotic animals. Belmont was certainly a showpiece!

Perhaps the showiest piece of it all was the Grand Salon, the last big addition to the main house, completed in 1860. The room was designed by Adolphus Heiman, one of Tennesseans’ favorite architects at that time, and is two times the size of my house. It was airy, light, and had not only a twenty-two foot barrel vaulted ceiling but a working fountain too!

From a decorative arts perspective, the space was truly over the top. Its wood floors were painted in imitation checkerboard marble, the walls were painted to resemble marble and limestone blocks, all of the windows and shutters were faux grained oak, the barrel vault ceiling was painted with clouded sky, and the cornice had a gluttonous amount of gilding. But as time marched on, tastes changed, and all of this splendor was covered up with paint, canvas, and new flooring.

Over the past few years, Belmont has been preparing for a massive restoration of the Grand Salon by doing paint analysis and other investigations. The original painted floor was discovered beneath two modern floors. Canvas on the walls was peeled back to reveal the faux limestone and marbleized blocks. And 1850s faux oak graining was found on nearly all of the woodwork. The restoration launched January of 2019 with the restoration of the marbleized block floor.

Restoring the woodwork

After the floor came the woodwork. Since June, I have been restoring the Grand Salon’s woodwork to resemble the first generation faux oak finish. I started on a pair of shutters and window architrave. This multi-step process starts with elbow grease and sandpaper. A smooth, even surface is a must if you are going to put the time, effort, and money into faux graining something! The second step is the base coat. Here we used an oil-based golden yellow paint. The base coat color sets the overall tone for the finished product. (Different woods require different base coats, but most range from yellow to pink.)

Finally, we get to the good part: the faux graining! This part of the process is two steps, the first being imitating the wood-grain. I create the graining with a translucent glaze (paint + turpentine + oil), which I apply uniformly and then strategically remove and manipulate with various tools and brushes.

The window and door architraves are composites of several different kinds of mouldings. To highlight the complexity of these architraves, I grained different pieces to resemble different cuts of oak lumber. You can see this below: the shutter and plinth block are straight-grained, whereas the moulding on the right is grained with a very stylized figure grain. (The plain yellow pieces have not been grained yet.)

The stripey straight-grain is created by brushing on the glaze and then combing it with a metal comb. For the figure graining I use various brushes and burlap. The graining on the entablature at the top of the architrave imitates quartersawn oak with silvering.

Once the graining layer has dried, I apply a transparent tinting glaze over top. This gives the graining a richer color and completes the illusion of real wood. Finally, I varnish everything to protect it. The finished product:

Stay tuned for more photos and posts about my work at Belmont! To learn more about Belmont Mansion and its restoration, take a look at their website.