Although wood is the primary material encountered at Capital Restoration, our craftspeople are also skilled at the restoration of metal artifacts. A complex and challenging example is an Indo-Persian suit of armor, dating from about 1800. Consisiting of a helmet, arm guards, breast plate, back plate and a shield, it was largely intact including the cloth […]

In the Orthodox Christian Churches, icons are religious works of art which assist the worshiper to focus their attention during prayer.Traditionally painted on wooden boards, they are vulnerable to changes in relative humidity which causes the wood support to expand and contact fracturing the paint layer and causing it to lift.Such was the case with […]

During a recent move, one of the movers tripped and fell. Fortunately, he was uninjured but the antique chair he was carrying did not fare so well. It was shattered into many pieces and the mortise and tenon joints between the legs and seat were broken. There were also numerous scratches and abrasions to the […]

One summer afternoon, a client brought a box into Capital Restoration containing the fragments of a table and asked if it could possibly be repaired. Upon examination, it was determined that the table was Chinese and made in the nineteenth century from East Indian Rosewood.It had the traditional miter joint leg corners, favored by the […]

A few weeks ago, a beautiful early nineteenth-century frame arrived at Capital Restoration. It had survived the centuries in near perfect condition until a disastrous slip crushed one of the ornately carved corners.Carving high-quality frames at this period involved two different specialized carvers. A wood carver carved the frame in wood and then it was coated with […]