House Painters St Ives

Cedar done properly

St Ives carries a notable concentration of cedar-clad homes from the project-home era, and cedar is the substrate that punishes the wrong decision hardest. The timber is resinous and mobile: standard acrylic rolled straight over raw or weathered boards fights the timber’s movement and its extractives, so tannins bleed through and the film releases in sheets. That is how cedar fails: not from age, from the wrong system.

Done properly, cedar gets a penetrating oil or stain that soaks into the board, moves with it and wears down gradually instead of peeling. Boards gone silver-grey are washed and brightened back to colour before oiling. Where an owner wants a solid painted finish, the timber is primed with a stain-blocking oil-based primer first, and the decision is treated as permanent, because reversing it means stripping. Timber decks on these homes get finishes matched to the cladding, so the whole house ages evenly.

Working with brick you cannot change

Brick veneer’s colour was fixed at the kiln 50 years ago, so a St Ives facade is modernised through everything around the brick: fascias, gutters, eaves, window frames, the garage door and the front door. Those elements make up a surprising share of what the eye reads from the street, which is why a repaint transforms a house without touching a single brick.

The palette does the heavy lifting. Deep charcoals and soft off-whites calm a busy 1970s brown; crisp whites lift blonde brick; the wrong cream turns the whole facade muddy. The included $275 colour consultation settles it with brushouts held against your actual brick in your actual light, because brick colour on a chart and brick colour on a wall are 2 different things.

Full render repaints

Rendered and bagged homes across St Ives share 2 predictable conditions: hairline cracking as the substrate moves, and chalking as the old coating breaks down. Preparation deals with both. The facade is pressure-washed, cracks are raked and filled, chalky surfaces get a binding primer so the new coats grip render rather than powder, and the topcoats are flexible acrylics that bridge fine movement instead of reopening along it.

Colour on render carries further than owners expect, because a rendered facade is a single large uninterrupted surface: a mid-grey chip reads near-charcoal across a whole wall. Sheen matters just as much, since higher sheens telegraph every trowel line. Both calls get made with brushouts on the wall itself, and the finished facade looks intended, not approximated.

Interiors of the era: keep the timber or paint it

Inside, the 60s and 70s left stained timber ceilings, exposed beams, wall panelling and internal brick features, and every owner faces the same fork: restore the timber or paint it out. Both are legitimate. Kept timber is cleaned and recoated so it reads warm rather than tired. Painted timber demands a stain-blocking primer first, because decades of stain and resin bleed straight through anything less and yellow a white ceiling within months.

Painting out dark timber is also the fastest way to change how these interiors feel, since a pale ceiling returns the light the original palette absorbed. Whichever way an owner leans, the choice gets worked through in the colour consultation, and the painting is done with floors sheeted and furniture masked, the same protection discipline every interior gets from us.

What St Ives homes book us for

Nearby suburbs we also paint

St Ives Chase, Pymble, Gordon, Killara, East Killara and the wider upper North Shore. See every area we cover.