So you want to open a restaurant, pt. 3: finishes

aka the F.U.N. stage!

We’re picking things up where we last left it in part 2: drywall is up, and we are primed for paint.

Something we knew very early on (like back in 2022) is that we wanted the walls to be finished with a limewash paint. Trevor and I used limewash—and variants of this, Portola Paint has a product called “Roman Clay” which seems like a hybrid between limewash paint and plaster—throughout our home, and love how its inherent aged look makes a space feel broken-in and homey from the get go.

Left: Portola's Roman Clay in our living/dining room. Right: Remember all that demo in part 1? Here is some of that wood repurposed as our home closet, drywalled, and limewashed :-)

The random nature of limewash’s application (brushstrokes in free-flowing, overlapping X’s) and its intended-to-be-layered sheerness also means it’s very hard to make look bad, and not deeply romantic. I know paint rollers and sprayers are supposed to be somewhat foolproof, but every time I’ve tried using either, I somehow end up with streaky and uneven layers.

We’ve trusted Color Atelier’s paints and plasters for the majority of our home projects, and so, could see no reason why not to also for the restaurant. Initially, Trevor, Ren, Jesse, and I played around with the idea of painting each unit varying shades of orange-yellow, so when walking through the space, you had the sensation of *gasp* walking into a setting desert sunset: