I live in Sweden but very close to Copenhagen. I spend a lot of my time and too much of my money indulging my interest in mid-century Scandinavian design. I also really love fixing up cast off furniture.
I recently sanded and soaped a very ratty Danish teak chair. The previous owner was a heavy smoker. It was impossible to be in the same room with the chair.(Sorry, no pics. It's gone now.) I got the idea because some of Wegners stuff was soaped.
I thought the results were delicious. Soaped wood has a "hand" that is silky and alive in a way that oiled or varnished surfaces do not come close to. I also liked the fact that teak does not go dark when you soap it. I remains light brown.
Anybody else tried this? It is an old, traditional finish that is enjoying a comeback with some of the younger designers here.
Soap for furniture and cane
The stuff to use is sold in better furniture stores here. It is pure soap i.e. lye and fat. Not scented and absolutely not normal detergent. They are white flakes. You dissolve them in warm water and let them cool.
The result is a thick, white cream. You fine sand the wood, apply the cream with a cloth and then fine sand the surface again after it has dried.
I swear, blindfolded, I could feel the difference. You can feel the wood because there is no substance covering the wood any more. Just silky smooth wood.
To clean the furniture, use a damp cloth and then resoap it.
Another thing is that I read on the website of one of the best caners in Denmark is that cane is supposed to be soaped twice a year to keep it fresh and pliant. So anybody with a caned chair might want to look into it as well.
I had a pine floor with a soap finish
in a house that we lived in in Denmark and it was really, really nice on bare feet. I loved the color, too. I would try it on furniture if and when the chance comes along.
The Scandinavians have products specifically for this (at least in Denmark they do) but my Danish friends said that it's just Ivory bar soap. I have made liquid soap out of shaved flakes of Ivory soap but haven't used it on furniture yet.
You can buy the readymade stuff with white pigment added, which I think is a lovely look.
I brought back some of the white pigmented soap from Denmark and also a quart of the lye solution that they pretreat pine floors with. I tried that on a scrap of American pine and it turned it an ugly greenish yellow. I never found out what the next step is after doing the lye treatment. I was told that it is used to bring out the yellow pigment in the pine, but not how to get rid of it at that point! Sand it off maybe?
Probably not germaine to this discussion anyway since pine isn't used much for furniture. But I've always wondered about it, and last time I checked there wasn't much on the internet about it.
Ivory soap
Funny you mention Ivory soap, because I was very close to using the description "like flakes of ivory soap" when describing the stuff I buy commercially.
Yeah, you are right. They use soap on wood floors in Sweden too. Beautiful.
Finally, here is a link to the cane speciallist in Denmark. It contains the recommendation to use soap on cane seating.
http://www.bruunolsenflet.dk/index.asp?ID=489
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