Groveland woman brings artist's touch to home design
Will Broadhus
Groveland's Audrey Quenneville has always worked in jobs where art and commerce intersect. Art galleries, advertising departments and department stores have occupied and trained her to identify and satisfy, other people's tastes.
Quenneville started The Artist Touch painting company three years ago, which she describes as "a small boutique in the paint and decorating business."
"Color is emotion," Quenneville asserts, adding that "it's not something everyone is comfortable with." To illustrate, she shows a set of pictures of a room belonging to a young teenage girl who was, for a variety of reasons, very unhappy. Her foul mood was evident in the colors she had chosen for the walls, each of which looked like some stage of a bruise.
Quenneville's version redirected this despair, but didn't completely abandon colors that expressed what the girl genuinely felt. Instead, pitch black was eased toward slate gray, dark blue to a modestly bright purple. From unyielding tones, to related ones with a core of warmth, Quenneville turned the girl's room from a place for wallowing in misery, to a place to live in.
Getting to know clients, helping them define their lifestyle and express that in freshly designed interiors, is the personal part of Quenneville's job. Most of her work entails less extreme colors and fewer radical emotions than her miserable teenage client's, but the personal connection is indispensable.
As a "traffic coordinator" at Filene's, Quenneville provided the calm center to a creative storm, scheduling and consulting with models, photographers, copywriters and graphic designers as ad campaigns were conceived and then launched. In effect, her design board is an advertisement for how she thinks a client's house should look. It assembles all the different elements -- and this can extend from the color scheme to suggestions about fixtures and furniture -- and presents them as a coherent whole.
Quenneville's formal education included a term of design at the Paris Fashion Institute, where an exercise required her to sketch 99 variations on the theme of a short-sleeved dress. In a similar process, each room on her design board is conceived on its own terms, but also maintains themes that run through the layout. Continuity is provided by color, but can also entail elements in the furniture or rugs, or a design stenciled or free-painted along borders or in the choice of decorations.
Quenneville defines her use of color as "something coherent, but that flows." In other words, not quite a multicolored riot, but definitely not static monotone. "I'm not someone who just knocks out white walls," is how she downplays that option. Quenneville doesn't dispense with white, or some kind of off-white, as an option with other colors, but by itself it's something she wouldn't relish.
There should be some expressive element. She did a kitchen for one woman who, Quenneville noticed, collected anything to do with roosters. Quenneville stenciled the word "rooster," in cursive script, and in several different languages, on a border below the ceiling. "The word was the color," she explained. "Two to three colors" is her design standard, defining the "base, accent and trim."
Quenneville will strip wall paper, and does all painting herself -- within limits. There are heights her equipment won't reach. She also would prefer that contractors finish their work on a space before she starts, to avoid any "dings" in the paint. Otherwise, she is happy to step in at any point in a project, to hand over her design boards and color schemes to someone else, or she will execute everything herself from start to finish. She has done over bathrooms with free-painted clouds, and re-designed the complete interior of a new house for a doctor who relocated from Indiana.
In most jobs, she is given a budget and Quenneville adjusts. Re-doing a kitchen, for example, might only entail, in addition to new color, "a few accessories, such as knobs for the cabinets, new handles for the drawers -- and you're done." She sees herself as a valuable "second voice, when you need to hear that second opinion" when design decisions reach a stalemate.
