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Where Artistry Begins
We are Venetian plaster specialists and plasterers in Nottingham and across the East Midlands, an hour up the M42 and M1 from our studio in Birmingham. That closeness changes things: we can survey a wall in person, drop tinted boards off and come back to look at a finish in daylight. Most of our work here goes onto 1930s semis, Victorian terraces, the villas west of the city and the converted lace market flats. Ring 07592 929191.
Nottingham is Victorian and Edwardian terraces, larger villa suburbs to the west, converted lace market warehouses in the centre and a very wide ring of 1930s semis around all of it. The older stock is solid walled and wants lime, or at the very least wants checking for damp before anything hard goes onto it. The 1930s houses have a cavity, so breathability is less of an argument there and the real question becomes what textured coating or lining is already on the wall.
Nottingham has a very wide belt of 1930s and post war semi detached housing, and a good share of it was given a textured coating at some point in the seventies or eighties. That matters twice over. First, any textured coating applied before the year 2000 may contain asbestos, so it does not get sanded, scraped or dry ground, and where there is doubt it gets tested before anyone touches it. Second, even a perfectly clean swirled surface is a poor base for a thin decorative finish. The honest answer is nearly always to overboard the wall, tape and level the new board and lay the finish onto that. It adds a day and it removes the whole argument.
The terraces and the older semis have almost all had the front and back rooms opened into one, and the wall you are asking us to finish is often two materials pretending to be one. Original brick and lime on one side, a modern stud and plasterboard infill where the chimney or the dividing wall came out, and a beam somewhere between them. Those two dry at different rates and move at different rates. A polished finish laid straight across will find that joint inside a year. So we either tape and reinforce the junction properly or we overboard the whole run so the finish sits on one continuous material, and we tell you which before we start.
The larger Victorian and Edwardian villas west of the city have hallways and stairwells running two full storeys, and a stairwell is the hardest space in a house to finish decoratively. There is no flat floor to stand on, so it is towers and staircase scaffold rather than a hop up. More to the point, a polished finish has to be kept live across its whole area until it is laid, which on a two storey wall means several pairs of hands working at once rather than one applicator working round it. That is why a stairwell is not a small extra on top of a hallway quote. We plan it as its own job, with its own days and its own crew size.
The converted warehouses in the lace market are brick and cast iron outside and almost entirely dry lined inside, and how that lining was built decides what we are allowed to do to it. A lot of conversion work uses independent studs or resilient bars to meet the acoustic rules between flats. Screw through that and you bridge it, and you lose performance you cannot see and cannot easily put back. So we do not batten those walls out. We check the build up first, overboard with adhesive or an approved fixing pattern where we have to, and otherwise work with what is there. Ceiling heights are generous, so one finished wall does a lot of work in a small flat.
Most of our Nottingham work is in occupied family homes rather than empty apartments, and that changes how we run a job. We take one room at a time and hand it back before opening the next. Floors get boarded rather than just sheeted, because trowels and buckets get put down somewhere. Levelling coats are sanded with extraction rather than a bare orbital, so the dust stays in the room it belongs to. And we tell you honestly which days are wet, noisy and best avoided and which are quiet, so you can plan around the ones that matter. It is somebody’s kitchen wall, not a building site.
Nottingham is close enough that a lot of our trade customers simply drive over. Material is machine tinted at the Birmingham studio and can usually be collected the same week, or shipped tracked if that suits you better. Decorators and small firms from across Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire come the same way for the Zavoré Academy, where you learn these finishes on a real wall with somebody watching your trowel instead of off a video. If you would rather we simply laid it for you, our own applicators come out and stay until the work is finished.
Nottingham is around fifty five miles from our Birmingham studio, up the M42 and the M1, so we can be there and back inside a day. That means we survey in person before quoting, we can bring boards over for you to look at, and we can return to check a finish once it has dried out fully. Parking is straightforward in the suburbs and needs booking for the city centre flats.
If you have searched for polished plaster near me and ended up with general builders, here is the difference: decorative plastering is the whole of what we do. Polished plaster, Marmorino, limewash, Tadelakt, metallic and textured stone finishes, laid as the finished surface rather than as a base for paint. We make and tint the material ourselves in Birmingham and we lay it ourselves across Nottinghamshire, so there is one number to ring whether the question is about colour, coverage or the wall you already have.
Polished Plaster · Limewash · Liquid Metal
Polished Plaster is what most people here are picturing: a deep, stone like feature wall in a knocked through living room. Limewash suits the older solid walled terraces and the chalky matt look family homes keep asking for. Liquid Metal we keep for small areas, alcoves and fire surrounds, where a burnished panel does more than a whole wall would.
See the colour libraryBoth, and it is the same team either way. We make and tint the material and we lay it ourselves, so the applicators on your wall are the people who mixed what is on their trowel. Plenty of firms in Nottingham will fit a decorative finish they bought from a trade counter. We would rather answer for the material and the workmanship together than point at each other.
We can, but we overboard it rather than flatten it. Any textured coating put up before 2000 may contain asbestos, so sanding or scraping it is not something we will do, and even a clean textured surface makes a bad base for a thin finish. Overboarding adds roughly a day, gives you a genuinely flat wall and takes the risk out of the job entirely.
Two days is normal for a single feature wall and three to four for a whole room. That is coats and drying time rather than slow work: each layer has to go off before the next can be laid and burnished. If the wall needs overboarding or levelling first, add a day. The day count goes in the quote so you can plan the room around it.
Yes. Derby, Leicester, Loughborough, Mansfield and the villages between them all sit inside our normal run from Birmingham, and none of it is far enough to need an overnight stay. We build travel into the price once rather than charging a call out on top of it. If you are further out and still want us, ring and ask instead of assuming the answer is no.
We are an hour away, so start with a look rather than a guess. Tell us the room and the colour you have in mind and we will come and see the wall before anyone starts talking about price. 07592 929191.
We also supply the trade by post, wherever you are: the shop ships tracked UK-wide, and the Academy teaches the finishes in Birmingham. Plasterers working in Nottingham can join the approved installer list.
Authentic Venetian plaster, machine-tinted to your colour and made for each order. Materials, installation and master-led training, since 2021.
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