When to Paint Over Your Home’s Woodwork—and When to Leave It Alone
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When to Paint Over Your Home’s Woodwork—and When to Leave It Alone

Go ahead, take a can and brush to wood paneling and trim. Design pros say it’s (sometimes) OK.

By CHRISTINA POLETTO
Thu, Feb 2, 2023 9:12amGrey Clock 3 min

TWO YEARS AGO when Kate Arends and her family moved into their 1956 rambler-style house in St. Paul, Minn., they encountered a thoroughly outdated kitchen that included uninterrupted oak paneling on the ceilings and walls. Not loving the wood’s golden hue, Ms. Arends, founder of lifestyle brand Wit & Delight, considered painting over it or sanding it down to a more neutral complexion, but the costs seemed prohibitive and the payoff uncertain.After the family had lived with the wood for a year, they decided to honour its hue but surround it with more modern décor. They painted Shaker-style cabinets a daring, un-woodsy powdery rose tone—Sulking Room Pink by Farrow & Ball—and further punched them up by installing slabs of Calacatta Viola marble with its trademark whorls of black and deep purple. An ink-blue gas range adds another shot of the unexpected.

“If the wood is in great shape, the constraints of working within the shade or hue of the stain might seem limiting, but some really interesting solutions can come from those constraints,” said Ms. Arends.

Given the expense and difficulty in removing paint from architectural woodwork, the consensus among interior designers and even real-estate agents is that, if it is historically accurate and in good shape, put down the paint brush and leave it be. Said Jeff Walker, a broker and founder at Agents of Architecture in San Diego, a firm specialising in unique and historic properties, “Our buyers seek untouched homes or homes that have been tastefully restored.”

Lauren Caron, of Seattle’s Studio Laloc, bucked a local trend for drenching wood-filled, early 20th-century Craftsman bungalows in alabaster paint. The interior designer disliked how that approach thoroughly squelched the spirit of the rooms. “It felt like the walls became vacant or less lively,” she said. In the dining space of her own 1916 Craftsman,  she decorated to complement the espresso-hued old-growth fir that had been used to construct a built-in breakfront cabinet and frame the doorways. She introduced an onyx and gold modern chandelier to offset the vintage millwork, added Gucci’s Herbarium wallpaper and completely upholstered a posse of Parsons-style chairs, to avoid adding any more wood.

Some instances, however, call for the can and brush. In a bedroom of her 19th-century Greek Revival home, Susan Brinson, a design consultant in Orange County, N.Y., was stuck with a mishmash of wood species and odd door placements. She and her husband painted the walls, doors, window frames and picture-frame moulding a deep teal, then cloaked the ceiling in a lighter teal. This move turned chaos into coherence and delivered a bonus benefit: Some of the couple’s favourite wood furniture, including a Bunny Williams Bamboo bed and antique Italian burled-wood side tables, pop against the rich colour.

Painted wood has other advantages. In the entry of a London townhouse, shown above, local studio Retrouvius Reclamation and Design repainted the joinery a fern green. “Scratches and scuffs from bicycles are more easily repaired in the eggshell-finish paint than they would be in bare wood,” noted a studio spokesman. One of the homeowners co-founded Dashing Tweeds, a designer and purveyor of bright, modern textiles. “Painting is perfect for him because it brings colour and character and is changeable,” said the spokesman. “Paint lets homeowners express themselves.”

Laura Castergine of Melrose, Mass., an amateur decorator, posts photos of her family’s 1904 New England Colonial on social media. Four rooms in the home feature fireplaces with surrounding millwork, three of which were painted before she bought the home. She recast one of those rooms last fall in a subdued sapphire, Wild Blue Yonder from Benjamin Moore, a heritage hue that suits the old house’s personality. “Enveloping a room in a single color achieves a dramatic effect,” said Ms. Castergine. “It’s similar to a wood-panelled wall in that they both bring a cozy feel to a room.”

For her quaint A-frame cabin tucked in the woods of Spooner, Wisc., Ashley Mary of Minneapolis polled Instagram followers about painting the pine-planked triangular back wall to match the room’s other, white walls. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Ms. Mary typically likes walls to function as a blank canvas against which she can arrange funky furniture and mobiles. But because the cabin doubles as an Airbnb rental, she wanted the public’s input. The majority of respondents voted to keep the wall natural (with copious exclamation marks) with many pointing to the house’s forest location and cabin aesthetic as rationales. Ms. Mary complied. “With any coat of paint,” she said, “you’re going to lose that texture and natural warmth that no colour will ever recreate.”



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Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.

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Early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month.

By Robb M. Stewart
Tue, Apr 15, 2025 3 min

OTTAWA–The nascent recovery in Canada’s housing market has become a casualty of the trade dispute with the U.S.

The latest national home-resale data are due out Tuesday, but early indications from several big regional real-estate boards suggest March was overall another down month as many prospective buyers exercised caution.

The recent weakness in home sales has dimmed the previously brighter outlook for the property market coming into 2025, when buyers were encouraged by the Bank of Canada’s aggressive interest-rate cuts.

“The chills the U.S. trade war has sent through participants in the housing market are getting frostier,” said Robert Hogue , assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada.

Hogue said resales are down materially in a number of markets two months running, and home prices in several markets are coming under pressure as inventories rise. And although Canada was spared additional levies when President Trump unveiled so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries earlier this month, no meaningful rebound is likely so long as trade uncertainty lingers, he said.

Home buyers in Toronto, Canada’s most populous city and the country’s financial hub, aren’t turning up for the usual spring pickup in property-market activity.

Sales in the Greater Toronto Area slumped 23.1% in March from a year earlier, as new listings for the region jumped close to 29%, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. That marked the worst month of resales since 1998.

The board’s chief information officer, Jason Mercer , said many potential home buyers were likely taking a wait-and-see approach given the economic worries as well as a pending federal election. “Homebuyers need to feel their employment situation is solid before committing to monthly mortgage payments over the long term,” he said, adding that ownership has become more affordable and prices in the area fell about 3.8% year on year in March.

Uncertainty is also weighing on the housing market in Calgary, the biggest city in oil-rich Alberta. The city’s real-estate board said realtors reported a 19% drop in sales of existing homes from last year, with a similar trend of improving supply and a sharp increase in the average number of days that homes were on the market.

On the West Coast, home sales registered in the metro Vancouver area of British Columbia were the lowest for March since 2019, falling 13.4% on a year earlier and coming in close to 37% below the 10-year seasonal average, while active listings continued to rise.

There are some areas of resilience. The Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers said total sales in the province were up 9% year on year in March. Still, RBC’s Hogue estimated Montreal sales in March were down about 15% from December seasonally adjusted, effectively rolling back the advance since the end of last summer.

The most recent national data for the country, from the Canadian Real Estate Association, showed resales dropped 9.8% month over month in February, when homebuyers may also have been put off by harsh winter storms in parts of the country. That marked the sharpest fall since May 2022 and brought the level of sales to their lowest level since November 2023, snapping signs that activity had been picking up in recent months.

Rishi Sondhi , an economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, in a recent report estimated the country was tracking toward a double-digit quarterly decline in Canadian home sales and a mid-single-digit drop in Canadian average home prices for the first three months of 2025. That is much weaker than a pre-Trump inauguration forecast made in December that projected a loosening in federal mortgage rules, lower interest rates and continued economic growth would fuel a modest gain in sales and prices.

Central-bank officials are set to decide Wednesday on monetary policy, but they have signaled a cautious approach to rates as they balance the prospect of tariffs stoking price pressures against the likelihood that they will dampen demand and weigh on the economy. That could mean the Bank of Canada will pause after seven straight cuts to its policy rate.

Housing is a hot topic for party leaders campaigning ahead of the April 28 election, with both the incumbent Liberal Party and opposition Conservatives proposing tax cuts and incentives to encourage buyers and builders.

The outlook for new homes has also dimmed with the tariff threat. The value of residential-building permits issued in February fell 2.9% from a month prior, adding to a retreat in January that took back some of the surge in intentions in the final month of last year, Statistics Canada data last week showed.

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