Venetian plastering in Manchester

A lot of the best flats in Manchester are conversions, and a conversion has very little decoration left in it. No cornice, no picture rail, one long run of wall from the window to the far corner and a ceiling higher than anything built today. That puts the character of the room into the surface. Polished plaster gives depth and movement across a wall that size without adding a single line to it, which is why it tends to win over paint or panelling in those rooms. The same holds in city centre bars, salons and receptions, where one finished wall can do the work of a whole fit out.

Before we quote anything we want to know what the finish is going onto. In the mill conversions it is usually plasterboard, either on studs or dabbed onto the original brick, and dabbed board sounds hollow and flexes when you lean on it. We tap the whole wall first. Anything drumming gets refixed or overboarded, because a polished finish is thin and hard and it will telegraph every soft spot underneath. Long walls need a straight edge run over them as well. A deviation you would never notice in magnolia reads clearly once a wall is burnished, so the levelling coat does more work here than the finish does.

Rain here arrives sideways and a lot of the older stock has no cavity to stop it. Solid brick gables, mill walls and the back additions on terraces can carry moisture through, and if you seal that face with an acrylic finish you trap it and the wall pushes it back out at the edges. On a solid external wall we use lime, so Marmorino or limewash, and the surface stays open and dries out again. Where the wall is boarded and internal, which covers most apartment work, the harder polished systems are fine and will take a wipe. Telling those two apart on site is most of the job.

Three ways this works. We ship material to Manchester tracked, tinted to your colour before it leaves us, with boards made up in the same batch. We install, with our own applicators travelling up rather than a subcontractor we found locally. Or you learn it at the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham, which is a couple of hours down the M6 and is the route a lot of North West decorators and small firms take when they want to add the finish to what they already offer. Whichever one you want, the conversation starts the same way, with the room, the substrate and the colour.

The other half of the city centre market is new build rather than conversion, and it runs to a different rhythm. Boarded walls, dry and stable, taped joints, and a programme counted in days. The advantage is that the substrate is predictable and the finish goes on fast. The risk is everything else on site. A polished wall is the last thing you want finished while other trades are still working, because it is thin, hard and expensive to make good once it has been knocked. We ask to come in late, after the joinery and before the floor goes down, and we will sequence around a handover date if you give us the date early enough.

Manchester brings us more hospitality work than most cities we travel to, and a fit out makes its own demands. It usually has to be done inside a shutdown week, often overnight, and the surface then has to survive being cleaned every day by people in a hurry. That pushes the specification towards the harder polished systems with a proper wax or sealer over them, and it pushes the detail towards the parts people touch, such as bar fronts, back bars, reception desks, the wall behind a banquette. Liquid Metal does a lot of the work in those rooms. We price the hours we are actually allowed on site rather than assume a daytime run, and we say when a finish needs longer than the shutdown gives it.