Catchlight Painting

Catchlight Painting has been painting houses around Newton and the western suburbs since 1994, according to its own site, and its founder, Nigel Costolloe, still runs it. The jobs its customers keep describing are the kind that punish a sloppy crew: a Victorian with layered trim, a mansard roof with squirrel-chewed crown molding, a room in a century-old house where matching the existing color mattered as much as the paint itself. That focus holds up in what people who hired it recently say. In the last six months, one customer called a full interior repaint of a big Victorian an "exceptional job," pointing specifically to how the crew handled its complex detailing; another described the whole process as "drama-free," with fair pricing for on-time work and tips on preventing future issues; a third, mid-way through an ongoing string of projects, keeps coming back for the same attention to detail and what they called a "push for perfection." None of the four reviews posted since January raise a complaint, and that lines up with the longer history: 61 tracked reviews since 2021 across six different sites, a 4.9-star average on Google's own 102 ratings, and a 5.0 across a smaller sample of 8 on Houzz, with praise spanning both painting and side work like carpentry and small handyman repairs. It isn't a spotless record. One review — older than the recent run above — describes a dispute over a paid test to see whether paint could be stripped from a house: the hours billed, in the customer's account, didn't match the time the crew was actually on site, and the disagreement wasn't resolved by the time the review was posted. It's the one sour note here, and it's reason enough to ask for an itemized estimate before any diagnostic or test work begins. Catchlight also isn't BBB-accredited and BBB hasn't rated it, and while it lists a Massachusetts HIC registration (#151854) on Houzz and says it holds EPA lead-safe (RRP) certification and follows OSHA practices, none of that is independently verified here. This reads like the right call for a detail-heavy, possibly historic paint job where the finish needs to hold up to scrutiny — less obviously the cheapest option for a fast, low-stakes repaint. Get a written scope for any test or diagnostic work up front, and confirm current pricing before booking.