Birmingham, MI High-Gloss Custom Finishing

A whole-home interior and exterior finishing project featuring high-gloss paneled rooms, custom millwork, cabinetry, architectural woodwork and coordinated exterior surfaces.

Many finishes under one roof, held to a single standard.

This Birmingham, Michigan project brought together high-gloss paneled rooms, built-ins, cabinetry, doors and architectural millwork — and no two surfaces were treated the same way.

Each element received its own preparation and coating schedule, matched to the material it was built from, the design around it and the result it needed to achieve. The high-gloss areas stood apart from the rest of the work. Rather than a conventional architectural paint application, they were developed as a specialty finish, closer in method to automotive refinishing than to house painting. Every finish system was then adjusted around the material in front of it, the surrounding design and the intended look.

High gloss reveals every surface variation.

A reflective coating turns a wall into a mirror, and a mirror shows what is underneath it. The paneled walls and built-ins carried numerous joints, profiles and localized irregularities, and across the larger surfaces even a minor variation would read plainly once the light moved over it.

That set the standard for preparation. The goal was a flat surface across the full run of each panel, not only a smooth one. Smoothing the substrate was not enough on its own: any residual waviness would carry straight through the finished coating as the uneven texture commonly described as orange peel — easy to miss on a matte wall, and obvious under a gloss.

The preparation had to make the substrate flat, not simply smooth.

Applied Like An Automotive Finish.

The high-gloss surfaces were built up the way a show-quality automotive panel is — through repeated cycles of coating, sanding and inspection, each pass taking out a little more variation than the last. Contrasting guide coats did the diagnostic work along the way, making the remaining high and low areas visible so they could be corrected rather than coated over. The specialty finish went on only once the surface underneath was proven flat.

Preparation & finishing sequence

Completed the initial repair, priming and sanding sequence
Marked and corrected localized defects across panels and mouldings
Added three primer applications to the high-gloss surfaces
Block-sanded between each primer application
Used contrasting guide coats to reveal remaining high and low areas
Repeated inspection and correction until the surfaces were flat
Protected windows, floors and adjoining finishes during application
Applied the specialty finish only after the preparation was complete
Refined custom colors and finish systems with the project team where required

A Level Surface And Uniform Reflection.

The completed high-gloss surfaces read as one continuous plane. Light travels evenly across the larger wall panels, the mouldings and the millwork, without the broken reflections that give away an uneven substrate. The blue-backed built-ins hold that same clarity.

Across the rest of the property, the high-gloss rooms sit in coordination with the other custom finishes — each system distinct in material and method, all resolved to the same standard the gloss demanded.

Location

Birmingham, MI

Completed

2026

Client

Private Client

surfaces

Paneled Walls • Built-Ins • Cabinetry • Doors • Architectural Millwork

services

High-Gloss Finishing • Interior Painting • Cabinetry & Millwork Finishing • Custom Finish Development