For artist Tere Antoni, furniture is the canvas. She loves unlocking the creative potential of discarded antique chairs, meticulously restoring them with upholstery and hand-painting.

A baroque-look chair with old white damask upholstery becomes a functional piece of art in her hands, its scrolling, carved back and claw feet intricately detailed in silvery paint, its bold upper gold-and-red-striped tapestry pairing playfully with the chintz on the seat. A delicate, wispy tassel serves as trim.

“I love paintings and I have pieces in my home that I have hung on my walls, but for some reason I always felt attracted to the wood on furniture,” she explains, seated in the shared Powell Street artists’ studio where her Mezulejo line is based.

It all started when Antoni, who is Venezuelan-born, was living in California in the 1990s and saw the whimsical, animal-themed painted furniture that was coming out of the U.S. Southwest at the time. Clearly, it spoke to her: “I went crazy for these things. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is beautiful,’ ” she enthuses.

She ended up studying with one of the leaders of the folklike form, Jim Wagner, in Taos, New Mexico, and then launched her own line and later studied the practice more at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Following her husband here for his work in the film industry, the now Vancouver-based artist is setting up shop again—but this time moving into upholstery as well as painted wood. In fact, the fabrics are inspiring the painted parts: on one recent, sturdily square-backed colonial design, she plays off the print’s mod reds, chocolate browns, and golds in the designs she puts on the wood.

In her hands, a dated piece can become sleek and contemporary: she gives the wood of one curving piece a white wash, then pairs it with a cool geometric print in taupe and white.

A lot of artistic consideration goes into the pieces, which she sells for about $250 to $350, but she stresses: “These are functional—they are to use!” They also play nicely off today’s design trend toward mixing and matching eras in a single room, somehow feeling antique, contemporary, and artfully handmade all at the same time.

Antoni has also branched into painted bureaus, showing the Straight one refurbished piece where she’s painted around a framed antique portrait. She customizes each piece, drawing her inspiration from the furniture’s shape and feel.

Mezulejo (a play on the Spanish words for tile [azulejo] and table [mesa]) is expanding into other areas too, drawing on her own heritage. Antoni plays on Latin-American tiled tables with her own version: customized wood mesas with sunken, tiled centres that open to containers that can hold herbs, decorative succulents, small potted cacti, a grill, or even ice and drinks.

“As an artist I can work with a person if they want to match the counter with the tile,” she explains, showing one version that mixes contemporary grey glass with beiges and soft green tiles. The base is chunky and pedestal-style.

“You can close it off if you’re having a big dinner and need to use the centre for serving space.” She’s working with a carpenter who can also craft traditional benches to go around the sides of the mesa. “The beauty of them is you can seat eight people and they can all look at each other,” she says, adding such seating saves space by tucking in neatly under the table.

At the same time, she’s developing a line of reproduction tinajeros—antique furnishings that are particular to Venezuela. The decorative wood stands were used in colonial times to collect fresh water, filtering it through a special porous rock on the top and down into a pottery vessel held in the bottom. Now Antoni, who will hand-paint them in her signature styles, says the open structures can be used purely decoratively, holding plants and displaying objects on shelves inside.

Antoni debuted at the Eastside Culture Crawl last year, and you can find info on all her creations—restored to new life and custom-painted—at the Mezulejo website.