Venetian plastering in Surrey

Surrey’s Edwardian and inter war stock is the bulk of what we finish here. The rooms are generous, the ceilings are high enough to matter, and most walls have been patched, papered and re skimmed several times over a century. Underneath there is often original lime plaster, sometimes a later sand and cement repair, sometimes both on the same wall, and those two things behave differently under a polished finish. We map that before quoting. Where the old plaster is sound and keyed we build on it; where it is hollow or the repairs are patchwork we overboard and work off one substrate instead of three. Bays, picture rails and deep reveals then decide where the finish stops, and we agree that standing at the wall rather than on a drawing.

A good share of Surrey work reaches us through an interior designer or a main contractor rather than directly, and that changes how we run it. We work to the scheme. You give us the colour reference, we tint to it and make trowelled boards in the actual finish, at a size big enough to judge, and nothing is ordered until one has been signed off in the room it is going into. We sequence around joinery and decorating rather than fighting them, because a polished wall wants to go in after the dust and before the final coats elsewhere. And we price the hours we are actually given. If the programme only allows a split week, tell us early and we will plan the drying around it.

There is a lot of arts and crafts influence in Surrey housing, with tile hanging, deep eaves, oak, leaded glass and inglenooks, and a mirror polish rarely sits well in those rooms. The light through small leaded panes is soft and broken, so a high sheen has nothing clean to reflect and reads as glare rather than depth. Limewash and Marmorino do far better, giving a matt, slightly mottled lime surface that moves with the light and lets the timber stay the hard, dark thing in the room. They are also the more forgiving products on old uneven walls, which is generally what you find once the paper comes off in those houses. We keep the polished finishes for the flatter, more formal rooms.

The newer end of the Surrey market is gated developments and large modern houses, and they bring a different set of problems. The board is flat and dry, which is good, but these houses run warm, with underfloor heating, mechanical ventilation, and a first heating season in which everything shrinks a little. We would rather go in after the heating has run for a while than before it, and board joints get reinforced as a matter of course. Access is its own job, with gatehouses, delivery windows and sometimes a site induction, so we book it rather than turn up and hope. Floors, stone and joinery are usually finished by the time we arrive, so protection goes down before a bucket is opened.

In houses this size the question is not whether to use it but where. The most common answer is the hall and stairwell, because it is the one space every room looks into and it takes a continuous surface well over two storeys. After that come a drawing room chimney breast, a principal bathroom in tadelakt where the client wants no tiles and no grout lines, a cinema room or snug where a matt wall kills reflection. Liquid Metal earns its place on a single element, such as a bar front, a set of joinery doors, the wall behind a bath. Artificial Rock we keep for pool houses, spa rooms and garden buildings, where a heavier texture suits the space and a polished wall would look wrong in it.

Not every Surrey job needs us on site. We supply the material on its own, tinted to the reference you give us and shipped tracked, which suits a builder or decorator who has a client asking for polished plaster and a scheme already agreed. The tint is mixed to a recorded formula, so a later phase of the same house matches what went on first, which is worth knowing on a refurbishment running in stages. And for anyone who would rather learn the finishes properly than pick them up off a video, the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham teaches them hands on, which is a manageable trip from Surrey for a day or two.