Artisan Victorian paint company finds niche business stimulus in lockdown

Never underestimate the power of a woman with a grand plan for her locked-down partner to drive a sales surge for one of Australia’s most specialised paint manufacturers.

Four generations of Grimes & Sons have been based in the bushy Melbourne suburb of Eltham since 1956, but during the first lockdown in March, the family firm that makes and mixes paints, earth-based renders and original timber stains saw product demand double.

Just before the second and harder August lockdown that would keep Melbourne metro households gated for all but one daily recreation hour, Una Grimes reported an escalation of orders led by local women who came in saying, “I have to find something for my husband to do – anything – that’s outside the house!”

Local to Grimes’ paint-bespattered warehouse, where the wheels of tints and multiple buckets of river silts and shiny shellac flakes that make the place look like an artist’s studio on steroids, is Australia’s largest concentration of mud-brick housing.

In the 1950s and ’60s, a group of self-taught artisan builders and native garden landscapers gathered around the famous Eltham artists’ colony of Montsalvat. Their influential hero was the builder-designer Alistair Knox.

Using bricks they made of earth, massive timbers retrieved from country bridges and materials recycled from a city beginning to destroy its Victorian-era buildings, over several decades they became known as “the environmental building movement” and raised hundreds of “muddies” across the sparsely settled hills of the outer-eastern bush suburbs.

It’s these houses that so many local women decided their husbands needed to urgently re-render during lockdown. The windows needed repair and restaining too.

The go-to shop for the essentials needed for these home reno to-do lists is Grimes & Sons, which today is run by the grandson, Alan, and great-grandson Alex, of the original brush-wielding Grimes, a Liverpool painter and decorator who died from the effects of lead poisoning.

In the early ’50s, his son John, a handyman-painter who mixed his own coatings, migrated to Melbourne. Settling in Eltham, John Grimes snr was inevitably drawn into the orbit of Knox and the bush building school.

“When Knox wanted a particular stain and found he couldn’t get it,” says Alan Grimes. “My father made it up for him from ingredients he was carrying around in the back of his car.”

Such was the humble genesis of a business that continues to devise product and that, says Alex Grimes, 29, keeps secret some of the formulations it makes up using Australian river silts “that are as fine as talcum powder. It’s not just any old sand”.

Alan Grimes, 62, has been working in the family business virtually since he fled from school as an unengaged 15-year-old. For almost 50 years “Grimsey” has ridden the ups and downs of a building industry that in the early 2000s erroneously and temporarily limited the use of mud bricks for housing.

A creative personality in any case, who will make a paint or coating inspired by the colour of a gum leaf, a puddle, or a vial of central desert soil, the downturn ignited Alan’s problem-solving skills – “invention is my survival” – and Grimes & Sons mightily diversified its range to include unique timber coatings and floor stains.

A self-described “bucket chemist who makes it up as I go along”, Alan Grimes says the company’s current biggest seller is a wood stain that makes new timber look old. Only this month, they dispatched the grey stain to new clients in New Zealand.

“In the early days, we made stains to make timber look new and pretty. Now what’s hot is making new timber look old.” And, that has led this instinctive innovator to explore the apparently endless calibrations of shades of grey.

“When you get into greys it’s a whole new range of colours.”

The old-for-new stain product makes Grimes & Sons “the architect’s secret weapon”, says Alan. “Architects will come in asking for a certain colour and then I’ll show them a wild-card tone. They always go for the wild card.”