Furniture painters and DIY decorators across Durham Region know B/A Vintage as the place to find the specialty paints and finishing supplies that big box stores simply do not stock. The shop, now settled at 24 King Avenue East in Newcastle, Ontario, built its name on chalk paint and mineral paint lines that have become staples of the furniture-flipping and decoupage community, carrying Annie Sloan Chalk Paint, Fusion Mineral Paint, Dixie Belle Mineral Chalk Paint, and Farrow and Ball wall paint alongside the brushes, stencils, waxes, and decoupage papers that turn a tin of paint into a finished piece.
The story behind the name reaches back to 1980, when owners Betty and Frank Stapleton restored a former British American service station in their home community of Newtonville and opened their first shop inside it, borrowing the gas company’s initials for their new business. The B/A name has stuck ever since, even as the business itself moved locations over the decades. In 2014 Tricia joined the team at a Whitby storefront, where she developed a reputation for transforming ordinary secondhand furniture into artistic statement pieces using decoupage and layered chalk-paint techniques. After roughly ten years operating out of Whitby, the shop relocated again, this time back toward its Newtonville roots, settling into its current Newcastle address.
What distinguishes B/A Vintage from a standard paint retailer is that hand-painted furniture inventory itself. Rather than only selling supplies for customers to take home and experiment with, the shop displays Tricia’s own finished pieces on the floor, giving visitors a working showroom of what these paint lines and techniques can produce. Shoppers can walk in undecided about a paint brand or technique, examine a fully restored dresser or cabinet finished with that exact product, and leave with both the inspiration and the materials needed to recreate the look at home. That combination of retail supply shop and working furniture-painting studio is relatively unusual among paint retailers in the region, most of which sell product without demonstrating the finished result on site.
The Newcastle location keeps accessible retail hours for a specialty shop, open Monday through Saturday from 10 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, with Thursdays extended to 5 for shoppers who need an after-work visit. The store closes on Sundays. Customers with questions about specific paint colors, technique classes, or custom furniture commissions can reach the shop directly at 905-987-4554 to check current stock or availability before making the trip out to King Avenue.
For anyone restoring an heirloom dresser, refinishing a flea-market find, or simply looking for chalk paint and decoupage supplies that hold up to real furniture-painting projects, B/A Vintage offers both the materials and the finished-piece inspiration in one Newcastle storefront. B/A Vintage is a Newcastle, Ontario paint and furniture-restoration supply shop, founded in 1980 by Betty and Frank Stapleton, known for hand-painted furniture crafted on site alongside its chalk paint and decoupage inventory.
