Floor finishing & colour · Ledelle & Finch · Perrin’s Crossing · By appointment
Every colour in the library was rejected at least once.
We keep sixty-two finish recipes in binders on a shelf, and each one earned its place by being mixed on a customer’s own offcuts, in the customer’s own light, until somebody who lives with the floor said yes. Your floor’s colour will be rejected a few times too. That is the service.
Sixty-two recipes · mixed on your boards, judged in your light · a signed sample before a drop touches the floor
What we do
The three rooms of the studio
The finish library
Sixty-two recipes — oils, hardwax oils, waterborne stains and the two-part systems a busy kitchen earns — each one born on a real floor and kept with its formula, its sheen and a photograph of the room it came from. Yours will be number sixty-three.
Colour, matched at the house
We sand a window of your floor, mix against it in graduated steps, and rub each trial beside the window it will live in. Morning, noon and dusk get a vote. What you sign is a physical board that stays with the job file — repeatable in ten years, batch for batch.
Maintenance & recoats
The quiet half of the trade: a light abrade and a fresh coat on the schedule your floor’s wear actually suggests, not a calendar’s. Floors we finish keep a card with the recipe number; the recoat is mixed to match, years later, from the same page.
The sequence
How a colour is chosen
Four conversations, two of them at your house, none of them rushed. The floor wears the result for a decade — it earns the afternoon.
The studio visit
The binders, the boards and the coffee table. You leave with three candidate recipes marked and a sanded offcut of your own floor in a bag.
The first mixing
Each candidate mixed onto your offcuts in the studio, labelled, dried and cured — not photographed and emailed, which is how finishes lie.
The light trials
The boards go to your house for two days: windowsill in the morning, lamp at night, under the sofa in the afternoon. The household argues; we take notes.
The signature
The winning board is signed on the back, filed with the job, and the floor is finished to it — the same recipe, the same batch discipline, the same page in the binder when you need it again.
The shelf
The studio, in figures
Recent pages
Colours that made the shelf
Six floors from the last year’s pages, photographed at handover in the light they were mixed for. The recipe numbers are ours; the rooms are theirs.
We brought them a photograph of a floor from a house we rented twenty years ago, half a memory really. They mixed it onto our own boards, let the light argue with us for two days, and got closer than the photograph deserved. The signed sample hangs in our hallway like a small diploma.
Before the visit
Questions the binders raise
The five every studio visit starts with. Yours may be the sixth — it has happened before and the binder has room.
Oil or lacquer — which is better?
Neither, honestly, which is why the library holds both. Oils and hardwax oils live in the wood, repair with a cloth, and suit floors that get loved and lived on. Two-part lacquers armour the surface and suit boots, dogs and grandsons. We finish the question with your household, not our preference.
Can you match a colour from a photograph?
As a starting point, yes; as a promise, no — photographs lie about wood the way they lie about food. The mixing happens on your boards, in your light, until the room agrees. Expect the photograph to be bettered.
Does the whole floor need sanding first?
Usually yes — colour sits on the surface beneath it, and old finish carries an amber cast that lies under any new one. Where the floor is sound and only tired, a screen and recoat in a clear or lightly tinted system can skip the full cut; we will say which at the measure.
What does the recipe number buy me later?
Repeatability. The formula, the batch sizes and the sheen are on the page; a decade from now a recoat can be mixed to match the aged floor rather than the showroom card. The binder is the warranty nobody else thinks to write.
How dark can we go, honestly?
As dark as you like on oak — the fuming and the ebony stains are old friends — but dark floors publish dust, dog hair and every skipped sweep. We will make the sample anyway, and we will make the pale one beside it. Choose with the lights on.
Studio visits Tuesdays and Fridays, at the shelf · (555) 029-1175 · shelf@ledellefinch.example
Bring us the colour in your head
A photograph, a memory, a swatch of curtain — whatever you are carrying, the studio visit is free and the mixing is done on your own boards. shelf@ledellefinch.example