Venetian plaster in Glasgow,
trowelled by hand, never subcontracted

The classic Glasgow build up is solid sandstone outside, timber strapping fixed to the inner face, and lath and plaster on top of that. There is a void behind the finish, so the wall is lighter and more flexible than it looks, and the original lime plaster has often lost its key. We sound every wall before we start. Where the lath has blown, or the strapping has moved, we refix or we overboard, because a polished finish is hard and thin and will crack along whatever moves underneath it. Overboarding also gives us a chance to get the wall properly flat, which counts for more in a room this size than in a small modern bedroom.

A Victorian tenement room can run well over three metres to the cornice, and that changes three things. There is far more wall than the floor plan suggests, so material and time go up with it. We work off towers rather than hop ups, which needs the room emptied properly rather than pushed into the middle. And the finish has to stop somewhere clean. Running polished plaster into an ornate cornice is a mess, so we agree a stop line first, either tight under the cornice with a bead or a small shadow gap, and the cornice and the ceiling rose get protected before a trowel comes out.

Not every wall in a Glasgow flat needs a lime finish, but some do. Ground and garden flats, gable walls, and any room where the strapping has been taken out and the plaster now sits on the stone, can all carry moisture, and the west coast gives them plenty to carry. On those we use Limewash or Marmorino so the surface stays open and dries out again. We also look hard at what is already on the wall, because a modern sealed paint or a hard sand and cement patch is often the reason it was flaking in the first place. Boarded internal walls take the harder polished systems without any of that concern.

You can buy the material and lay it yourself. We tint to the colour you give us, we make up boards so you are choosing from a trowelled surface and not a photograph, and we send both tracked to Glasgow and anywhere else in central Scotland. You can have us fit it, in which case our own applicators travel up and stay for the run of the job rather than starting and stopping. Or you can learn it at the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham, which is worth the trip for a decorator or a small firm who keeps being asked for this finish and keeps turning it down.

Not all of the work here is tenement. The riverside blocks, the Finnieston and Merchant City conversions and the newer apartments south of the river are a different job entirely. New build means plasterboard on metal or timber: dry, stable, but jointed, so we reinforce the joints and let the base coat do the flattening before anything is polished. Ceilings are lower and rooms smaller than in a tenement, which suits a deeper, quieter polished plaster and punishes a busy one. Warehouse and mill conversions give us the opposite problem, with exposed brick, steel and returns that were never meant to be flat, so we price the build up separately from the finish.

Most Glasgow customers pick a colour before we ever get there, so we make that as safe as we can. Tell us the reference, or send a paint chip, a photograph of the floor or a piece of the joinery, and we tint a board and trowel it the way the wall will be trowelled. That board goes to you, not a photograph of a board. Then look at it in the room itself, at different times of day. West coast light is flat and often grey, and these flats have deep, north facing rooms with high windows, so a colour that sang on a screen can go dull on a wall. We would rather change it at board stage than at wall stage.