Polished plaster in Essex,
tinted, shipped and laid by us

Most of what we are asked for in Essex falls into two camps. There is the older village and market town stock — timber framed, lath and plaster, sometimes solid brick — where the walls move a little, are rarely flat and were never meant to be sealed. Then there is the modern commuter town house, dry lined or skimmed board, square rooms, lower ceilings and a wall that is already close to flat before we arrive. The material is the same either way, but the preparation, the base coat and often the product are not. We work out which one we are standing in before we quote, because pricing an old cottage as though it were a new estate house is how jobs go wrong.

A polished finish is thin, hard and unforgiving, so anything that moves underneath it eventually shows. In older Essex houses that usually means timber: studs, laths, lintels and old frames that shrink and swell with the seasons. We sound the wall first and push at it, and where the lath has lost its key or a panel flexes we overboard rather than argue with it. Board joints and any junction between two different materials get taped and reinforced in the base coat, not hoped over. Where a wall is genuinely lively, we will say so and put a limewash or a Marmorino on it instead, because a matt lime surface tolerates small movement far better than a mirror polish does.

A lot of our Essex work is in new extensions — side returns, rear kitchens, loft rooms — and they share one difficulty. They are usually glazed hard on one side, with roof lights or a full width slider, so raking light crosses the new plaster all day and picks out anything that is not flat. New board is flat in itself, but a skim that looked fine under a work light will not survive that. We flatten with our own base coat rather than trusting what is there, we run a lamp close across the wall before the finish goes on, and we let you see it under the real light before sign off. The feature wall is usually the one facing the glass, and that is the wall with the least margin.

Microcement is the other thing we get asked about in Essex, and it is a different job from a wall finish. On floors it goes over a sound, dry screed or a properly prepared board deck, and the questions that decide it are all underneath: what the screed is, whether it has been left long enough, whether there is underfloor heating and whether it has been commissioned and cycled. Movement joints in the substrate have to carry through the finish. In a wet room it gives you a seamless surface with no grout lines to fail, tanked and sealed properly behind it. We will not lay it over something we have not been able to test, and we would rather wait a week than chase cracks later.

Newer Essex housing is mostly dry lined — plasterboard dot and dabbed to blockwork with a void behind it. That is a good substrate for polished plaster, dry and stable, with two things to watch. The board sounds hollow between the dabs, so anything heavy going back on that wall needs a fixing planned before we finish it, not drilled through afterwards. And the original skim is often only as flat as the dabs were, which on a long wall is not flat enough for a high sheen. We check both, add a base coat where it is needed, and we say plainly when a wall would be better overboarded than polished as it stands.

You can have this three ways in Essex. We ship the material tinted to your colour, tracked, so a decorator or builder you already trust can lay it, and we send a trowelled sample board first so nobody is choosing from a screen. We can bring our own applicators down and do the whole thing, which is what most private clients want. Or you can learn it properly at the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham, which tends to suit decorators who keep being asked for polished plaster and keep having to pass the work on. Whichever way it goes, the tint is machine mixed to a recorded formula, so a second room next year matches the first.