Venetian plaster in Liverpool,
tinted to your colour and laid by us

The terraces around the cathedral quarter and through Toxteth are solid brick with no cavity, and the original internal finish is lime, either on lath or straight onto the brickwork. Those walls move moisture. If you close the face of one with a hard acrylic system the water finds the weakest edge instead, usually a skirting or a window reveal, and comes out there. So on solid external walls we use lime, which means Marmorino or Limewash, and we take the old impermeable paint off rather than bury it under something new. Internal partitions and anything already boarded are a different problem entirely and take the harder polished finishes without argument. Sorting one from the other is the first hour on site.

The chimney breast is the wall most people want finished and the wall most likely to fail. Decades of coal and smoke leave hygroscopic salts in the brickwork, and those salts pull damp out of the air and push it back through whatever you put over them. You see it as a tide mark or a bloom that keeps coming back through paint. A decorative finish will not stop it and nothing we sell will stop it. Where we find it we say so, and the options are honest ones: let the wall dry and deal with the salts first, or isolate it with an independent board and a ventilated gap and finish the board instead. What we will not do is trowel over it and take the money.

The waterfront and dock buildings turned into flats keep their brick piers, steelwork and joinery on show, and that changes what looks right on the walls between them. A high gloss burnished finish can fight raw structure rather than sit beside it. We usually push the sheen down, a Marmorino with a soft lustre or an Artificial Rock panel that reads as stone next to the brick, and keep the mirror work for quieter rooms. Practically, most of these flats are dry lined off the original wall, so the board is what we are finishing and not the brick. We tap the whole run before quoting, because dabbed board over a rough masonry face is rarely as solid as it looks or sounds.

The Victorian and Edwardian semis in the south of the city are full of the details that make decorative plaster slow: splayed bay windows, arched alcoves either side of the chimney, curved returns into a hallway. Every external angle on a polished wall is somewhere it can chip, and a bay has five of them inside three metres. We bed metal or plastic arris beads and float them out well wide, so the corner is straight and protected but you cannot read a line down it. Arches are worked in one pass so there is no cold joint sitting on the curve. All of that takes longer than a flat wall and we price it that way rather than pretending it does not.

Colour is the part people get wrong from a screen. Our material is machine tinted before it leaves Birmingham, so a colour is mixed to a number and repeats across every bucket in that batch instead of being stirred by eye on site. What we cannot control is the light in your room. Liverpool has a great many west facing rooms with a long low afternoon light off the water, and a warm grey that looked calm in a photograph can go distinctly pink by five o’clock. So we trowel sample boards in the actual colour, send them up, and ask you to stand them against the wall for a day or two before you commit. It costs a week and it saves a repaint.

Three ways of working with us and they all start with the same phone call. We ship material to Merseyside tracked, tinted to your colour, with sample boards trowelled from the same batch so you are judging a surface rather than a photograph. We install, with our own applicators travelling up and staying for the run of the job rather than a local subcontractor we have never met. Or you come and learn it properly at the Zavoré Academy in Birmingham, which is a straight run down the M62 and the M6 and is the route a lot of decorators take when they keep being asked for this finish and keep having to say no.