Furniture Painters in and around Farnham

Our workshop is in Surrey Heath, around twenty-five minutes from Farnham town centre. We collect and return across GU9 and GU10, covering the town itself — the old town, Hale, Heath End, Badshot Lea, and Wrecclesham — as well as the villages out towards Tilford, Frensham, Rowledge, Bentley, and Crondall.

The Old Market Place development is part of our regular patch too. The furniture coming out of the newer properties there tends to be a different brief from the old town — smaller, more recently bought, but no less worth painting.

Bear Lane, Castle Street, and West Street are not designed for stopping a vehicle and carrying furniture. We know this from experience. We also know that it is always manageable — it requires a bit of planning, usually a conversation with a neighbour, and a willingness to move quickly. We've collected from all of these streets without drama, and we'll tell you in advance what we need from your end to make the collection straightforward.

If you're in one of the houses on Castle Street and you're worried the wardrobe will never make it down the stairs and out to the van, that concern is worth raising when you call. We've navigated narrow Georgian staircases before and have a reasonable sense of what's possible before we arrive.

Corner cupboards come up more in Farnham than anywhere else we work, which makes sense: they were made for Georgian interiors, and Farnham has a lot of Georgian interiors. They are awkward pieces to paint — the internal corners and the door frames require care that a flat-fronted chest doesn't — and they tend to be the piece in a room that defines what the rest of the room's colour scheme has to work with.

When a corner cupboard gets painted, the room often follows. Customers who commission a corner cupboard in one colour have frequently come back for the dresser or the chest that was also holding out in its original finish.

The wardrobes we collect from Farnham homes are usually solid — mahogany, oak, or pine, built before flat-pack was a concept. They are large, they are heavy, and they are worth painting precisely because replacing them with anything of comparable quality is expensive. The brief is almost always the same: the wood is too dark for the room, or it doesn't match what came in when the room was repainted last year.

Dressers from the old town properties tend to have history behind them — pieces that came from a parent's house, or were bought at one of the antique dealers on West Street and have since been redecorated around. They deserve a careful surface preparation and a finish that doesn't obscure the character of the piece under an opaque coat of paint. We've found that chalk-finish paints — Annie Sloan in particular — suit Farnham furniture well: they sit on the surface rather than sinking in, and they can be waxed back to show a little of the grain underneath where the customer wants that.

Chests of drawers are the volume piece across all our work, and Farnham is no exception. The main variable is the drawer runner condition. Old mahogany chests with wooden runners can stick after painting if the fit is already snug, and we account for that with a light sand on the runners before anything goes on the carcass.

The newer properties at Old Market Place are a deliberate contrast to the old town streets. The furniture is different — more contemporary, bought recently, often with a sealed or lacquered factory finish that needs work before paint will adhere properly — and the pieces tend to be smaller. But the brief is recognisably the same: a piece that works in the space but isn't the right colour for it, and a homeowner who'd rather invest in painting it than replace it. The two-tone look is a frequent request.

We treat that furniture with the same care as the mahogany wardrobe from a house on Castle Street. The preparation is different; the result is no different.

Most Farnham pieces are back within two weeks of collection. Larger pieces — a full wardrobe, or a dresser with a separate top and base — may take three. This is often the case where we need to sand a top surface outside in the dry. Corner cupboards with fitted interiors are assessed when we see them; the timescale depends on what the brief involves. We'll tell you at the same time as we quote.