Artificial rock walls,
or real lime worked to look like stone

Settle this first, because it changes who you ring. If the drawing has relief in it — a rock face standing proud of the wall, an overhang, a grotto, a waterfall edge — you want a rockwork contractor with an armature and a carving mortar, and we will tell you so rather than sell you plaster. If the brief is a wall, a chimney breast, a bath surround or a bar front that should read as stone and feel like stone under the hand, plaster is the honest answer. It needs no substructure, no fixings and no allowance for weight, and it does not eat the room the way clad stone does.

Travertino is the closest we have to cut stone: worked in coats so the surface picks up the open, pitted, horizontally drifting character of travertine, then cut back and polished as far as you want to take it. Intonachino is a fine textured lime — a quieter, more even mineral face, the sort of thing you see on old Italian walls, and the better choice over a large area where a strong pattern would turn into wallpaper. Beton Stucco gives the concrete look: flat, cool and lightly mottled, right for a modern room where the reference is poured concrete rather than quarried stone. All three are machine-tinted to your colour.

Stone-effect plaster is a skin, not a build-up, so it inherits whatever it goes over. The background wants to be sound, dry and flat: fresh plasterboard, a skimmed wall, or a sound render. It gets primed before the first coat goes on. What it will not do is hide a moving wall, a damp wall or loose old paint — those come off or get made good first, and if you plaster over them you will see the same problem again through a more expensive surface. Outside work, and any wall with a history of damp, is worth a phone call before you order, because the right answer depends on what the wall is made of.

The tub does not contain the texture. Two applicators can take the same Travertino and produce a soft, almost smooth stone or an open, quarried one, and the difference is trowel pressure, timing, and how much gets cut back at the end. So agree the texture on a board before anyone touches the wall, and then keep that board — it is the reference for this job and for any repair years later. On site it means one applicator per wall, working corner to corner without stopping, because the texture of a fresh section will not marry into a section laid the day before.

Stone colours want to be quiet. These finishes carry their own depth through the texture, so heavy pigment tends to fight the effect — most jobs settle in a narrow band of limestone whites, greys, sands and warm putty, and let the light do the rest. Sealer goes on where hands, splashes or steam reach: bath surrounds, kitchen walls, hallways at shoulder height. Elsewhere it can be left as lime. Cleaning is a dry or barely damp cloth and nothing abrasive, with our plaster cleaner for marks that will not lift. Small knocks can be worked back in, but as with any trowelled finish a large repair is a wall, not a patch.