Venetian plastering in Birmingham

Everything happens in one building. We tint here, so a colour match is a job of hours rather than a shipment from Italy. The showroom holds boards of polished plaster, marmorino, limewash, liquid metal and artificial rock at full size, because a hundred millimetre chip tells you very little about a material that is read across a whole wall. Come and look in daylight, take a sample home, put it against your floor and your joinery. The Academy runs in the same space, which means the people teaching the finishes are the people coming to lay yours. If you want to see a material before you buy it, Birmingham is the one city where you simply can.

Much of the city’s housing is late Victorian and Edwardian, with bay fronted terraces and villas through Moseley, Kings Heath, Handsworth and Edgbaston, then interwar semis further out. These are solid nine inch brick walls with no cavity, built to breathe, and often carrying a century of different repairs. Expect blown patches, old sand and cement render on chimney breasts, and a bay wall that is never quite flat. We open up and read the substrate before we quote. Where the wall is damp or lime built we stay lime based, because a breathable marmorino or limewash lets moisture move and an acrylic film does not. High ceilings and deep skirtings mean more cutting in than a modern room.

The other half of the work is newer, in apartment blocks through the city centre and along the canals, and old workshops in the Jewellery Quarter turned into homes. New blocks are plasterboard on metal or timber, dry and stable but jointed, so we reinforce joints and let the base coat do the flattening before any polishing starts. Ceilings are lower and rooms are smaller, which flatters a darker, deeper polished plaster and punishes a busy one. Conversions bring the opposite, with exposed brick, steelwork, odd returns and walls that were never meant to be flat. We treat those as a build up job, not a decorating one, and we price the levelling separately so you can see it.

The material and the tinting are both in Birmingham, so a trade order does not sit on a container while a customer waits for a colour. We tint to your client’s colour, supply the base coats, tools and waxes to go with it, and tell you honestly which finish will behave on the wall you have described rather than selling you the one with the best photographs. If you want to add these finishes properly instead of guessing at them, the Academy teaches them hands on here, in small groups, on real boards rather than slides. We would rather the West Midlands had more applicators who can do this well than fewer.

Because we tint in the building, a Birmingham order does not wait on anybody else. Give us the colour reference and in most cases it is mixed, checked against a trowelled sample and ready the same week. You can collect it from us rather than wait on a pallet, which matters if you are a decorator running two jobs and need a second tub on Thursday morning. We keep the base coats, waxes, trowels and finishing tools on the shelf here, so a collection is one stop rather than three. If you would rather it came to you it goes out tracked like everywhere else, but nobody else in the country is ten minutes from the studio that tinted it.

We treat the West Midlands as one patch, taking in Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Dudley, Walsall and out into Worcestershire and Warwickshire. It is a short drive rather than a trip, so we can stand in the room and read the wall before quoting instead of working from photographs, and we can come back if something changes mid job. The stock shifts as you go out. Solihull and Sutton Coldfield bring large interwar and postwar houses with wide, flat hall walls that take a polished finish well. The Black Country holds tighter Victorian terraces on solid brick. Past Coventry and into the counties there are cottages and converted farm buildings where lime is the only sensible answer.