Polished plaster in Kent,
from oast conversions to new builds

Kent covers a lot of ground and the building stock changes as you cross it. The Weald and the villages give us timber framed, weatherboarded and tile hung cottages with lath and plaster inside. The market towns give Georgian and early Victorian town houses, solid brick, tall rooms, often listed or sitting in a conservation area. The farmland gives oast conversions, which are a problem of their own. And the commuter belt from the Medway towns outward gives large post war and modern family houses that are boarded, flat and comparatively straightforward. We price each of those differently, because the preparation is where the cost sits rather than the finish itself.

A round kiln converted into a room is one of the few places where a trowelled finish beats everything else, because it does not arrive in sheets. Wallpaper fights a curve, panelling has to be made for it, and flat paint just shows you how uneven the curve really is. Polished plaster and Marmorino follow it without a single joint. What they need is a continuous pass, so the wall gets worked all the way round in one go rather than stopped at some arbitrary point, which on a full kiln means two applicators moving together. The other thing worth knowing early is that these walls are rarely true, so we survey the curve before we price it.

An old Kent cottage is a frame with panels in it, and the frame breathes with the seasons. Oak shrinks through a dry winter with the heating on and takes some of that back in summer. Anything hard and brittle laid over a moving frame will craze eventually, and a fine polished finish is about as hard and brittle as plaster gets. So on timber framed and lath and plaster walls we use lime, which means Marmorino or Limewash: soft enough to move with the wall and open enough to let it dry. Where a room has already been lined with modern board on independent studs, the polished systems come back onto the table.

Most pre Victorian building in Kent is solid walled with no cavity, and on the coast and the exposed high ground it takes real weather. Sealing the inside face of a wall like that with an acrylic finish does not stop the moisture, it only changes where it comes out. So we use lime on solid external walls, and we remove whatever impermeable paint is already there rather than adding another layer to it. The other thing to settle early is consent. Internal finishes in a listed building can fall under listed building consent, and that is a conversation with your local conservation officer rather than with us. We will put our proposed build up in writing so you can hand it over.

The modern end of Kent is easier work and has rules of its own. Large family houses, loft and side return extensions, boarded walls that are already flat, and clients who want one media wall or a double height hallway done properly. Two things slow it down. New houses and new extensions are still drying and still shrinking for the first year or two, so we ask how old the build is and where the movement joints sit, and on a very new wall we would rather wait or specify a more forgiving finish. And underfloor heating on a screed needs its commissioning cycle run before we protect the floor and start.

Not everybody wants us on site, and that is fine. You can buy the material on its own: we tint it to your colour, trowel sample boards from that same batch so you are judging a real surface, and send the lot down tracked. You can have us lay it, in which case our applicators come down and stay for the run of the job rather than starting and stopping. Or you can learn it at the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham. Decorators from Kent make that trip fairly regularly, usually because they keep being asked for lime finishes on old buildings and would rather say yes than pass the work on to somebody else.