Stucco, marmorino, polished plaster, Venetian plasters, Italian plaster

We've a very busy few months ahead, with quite a number of projects to do in London: one of them is very large.

We're also involved in a very interesting local project. It's an Edwardian terraced house and marmorino is going to be used absolutely everywhere. We will also be carrying out a sgraffito piece which runs from inside the building right out. Siobhan is working on the cartoon at present, but the idea is that it will be a very stylized forest scene with quite a dark feel.

We will also be carrying out some freehand-modelled stucco work. The finish that's to be used throughout most of the interior is marmorino veneziano pietro, the colour will be produced by blending verde marble dust with a few other coloured marble dusts.

We'll also be finishing selected floors and work surfaces.

We're fortunate this time because we have permission to post pictures of the work as it proceeds, so we will have plenty to share.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

We've just completed an interesting new project in Dublin.  The client is a fashion designer and the architect is Donal Colfer.

The other finishes used in the design are terrazzo, walnut and glass, so that while this interior is very contemporary, it still feels warm and relaxing, and does not sacrifice the softness that can often be lost in a very modern scheme.

Talking with Donal, I knew exactly the look he wanted to achieve.  First of all, the finish had to be calming.  My initial thought was Japanese shikkui, but we also wanted it to have a slightly industrial feel, while suggesting the look of tadelakt.

I knew we weren't going to achieve this using a ready-mixed marmorino.  We were going to have to take this back - way back!

So instead of using air-hardening lime putty, we used natural hydraulic lime, and instead of just marble dust, we used a blend of marble dust and limestone in various granulations up to 0.9.  To this we added a few handfuls of river sand and just a smidge of secret ingredients X, Y and Z...

For pigment, we chose natural raw umber and a spot of black oxide.

The process was as follows:

- first layer applied randomly to create a suction coat
- second layer applied as the first, but scoured with a yellow pine float
- third layer: one hand of the material
- fourth layer: rework third layer with half-a-hand
- polish

The polishing is the tricky bit because of the limestone and river sand; if you're not careful you'll get a bruised, dark finish.

The final layer is a coat of encaustic wax.

This has to be one of my favourite finishes.  It's so soft and calm, and to anyone who knows what they're looking at, it's obvious that it hasn't come ready-mixed from a tub. A finish you make yourself from scratch has a totally different look.  Maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but I love it.

 

Here's one of the reasons why I love my job. You get to work in the most interesting locations. We completed this boardroom in Aldwych, overlooking the BBC World Service building.

The finish we used was bianco Marmorino Veneziano. We added crushed glass and metal powder; we also introduced cuts as a design element.

Last month we completed a private apartment in Sandycove, County Dublin for Olasky and Sinsteden. The master bedroom was finished in Marmorino Veneziano in a colour which reflected the sea view. The subtle shade was achieved by using a blend of different colours of marble dust; the surface was lightly polished with soft movement.

Elsewhere, Siobhan applied a painted basket-weave in Dutch Pink; a subtle foil for the client's art collection. We also finished some furniture items and gilded picture frames to complement the scheme.

Omega Flagship Store

Omega opened its flagship store on Regent Street on Monday.  We spent two weeks finishing the walls in stucco lucido.  The finish is very understated, with very little tonal variation, sharp, angular movement and a high polish.  It takes a lot of skill to produce this finish to Omega's standard - Omega expects the quality of the craftsmanship in its boutiques to match the excellence of their watches.  We appreciate this for reasons twofold: first, it keeps us from becoming complacent, and second, it means that the obsessive nature of our detailing does not go unnoticed.

So we returned from London last week by the skin of our teeth.

We were supposed to fly out of Heathrow on Saturday but as we finished early, we changed our flights to Wednesday, the day before all the airports closed and chaos began to reign at Heathrow.  We arrived home to impassable snowdrifts and have been enjoying the disruption from the comfort of the fireside with a cognac.  Did I say cognac?  I mean beer.

Paul and the guys recently finished a very interesting project in County Tipperary, working throughout a Georgian stately home. The finish was a very traditional classic marmorino. The process was as follows:

- three layers of natural hydraulic lime plaster, the final layer being finished with a yellow pine float; followed by five layers of marmorino with a marble granulation of 0.6. The final half-a-hand was a special sieved marmorino - the surface was then treated with Marseilles soap and natural bees wax. The result is cloudy, highly polished and very durable, and due to the lime plaster base, perfect for the restoration of a historical property.

London

London is my new favourite place in the world.  We worked there last year and were back again two weeks ago, to finish an jewellery boutique for Avakian.  The store was in the Carlton Tower Hotel in Knightsbridge.

The finish was stucco lucido finished with a hot iron.  The final surface is treated with Marseilles soap and wax.  The stucco has no tonal variation at all, and is extremely highly polished.  This finish takes a little longer to complete than, say, a typical spatolato, but the final result is stunning.

It amazes me that so many people in the UK seem to slate the city of London.  It has to be the coolest city in the world.  Fortunately, I was finished early enough every day to put some miles in on my Oyster card.

It looks like we'll be there a lot this year.  We've been asked to finish six more high-end boutique stores.  I'll have pictures soon.

MRV Architects, Sopot, Poland

Our good friends Voytas Augustyniak and Magdalena Dilling have launched their new website here.  We love their work; their designs combine contemporary architecture with an ecological ethos.  Voytas also loves marmorino, so we hope he's going to specify loads of it in every one of MRV's projects!

Hakka Noodle Bar, Clarence Street, Belfast

Last week we completed the marmorino interiors in Hakka Noodle Bar on Clarence Street, just behind the City Hall.

 The decor has a Shanghai colonial feel; the scheme contrasts copper leaf columns, antique brass tables and rich wooden furniture with black polished concrete floors and painted brick.  The benches are finished with gunmetal-coloured leather.

The wall finish which we produced for Hakka, has a very soft, subtle feel.  It just looks like the inside of a shell.  Metal powders added to the stucco and wax, combined with an adapted application method, left a wall finish reminiscent of mother-of-pearl.

Hakka opens tomorrow.

Sgraffitto

Here is some sgraffitto that we worked on.  We love this technique - even when you incorporate modern designs, it still has a mediaeval feel.

As with all lime finishing techniques, the most important ingredient is good lime and the correct grade of marble dust and sand.

There are two ways of doing sgraffitto: one uses marmorino as the final layer, while the other uses lime paint.  Both have their own unique look, and there are advantages and disadvantages to either method.

For example, a thicker final layer creates more of a three-dimensional look, but for facades, is more prone to gathering dirt.  The original technique, which you'll see in Florence, uses lime paint as the final layer - this has a very different appearance - at a distance it looks more like fresco, but viewed close up there's no mistaking what it is.

For these panels we used both techniques.
 

I spent two months in LA with Ian Hardwick and Ilia Anossov, kings of fresco. I now have enough fresco-based anecdotal mileage to last at least the next five to seven months. Avoid me at parties!

Don't Look Now

Last year at the Venice Biennale, I felt just like Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now...

Aphex Twin - Heliosphan

Today, this gets my vote for best work music ever composed.

Marmorino Veneziano

I have had a few enquiries about how to produce a marmorino veneziano finish.  There are a number of ways of doing this, but here's the one I find most effective.

First of all: don't use pigment in your marmorino.  The colours should be produced purely by the colour of the marble dust.  As you can imagine, this means that the colours will all be very pale and subtle.  We have six coloured dusts that we use, then by blending each dust, the colour range can be extended.

Here's the process, if you're applying the finish over a dry-wall or gypsum plastered surface.  If you're applying the finish on a facade, it's best to build up a few layers of intonacho first.

1. Apply a layer of quartz primer.  I always use a brush, never a roller.  Allow this to dry overnight.
2. Apply a first layer of marmorino.  Keep this layer fairly thick, and apply it in a random manner, with larger sweeps than you would normally use for a stucco-type finish, but still avoid straight lines.  Allow this layer to completely dry.
3. Apply a second layer, in a similar manner to the first, but tighter.  Allow this to completely dry.
4. Apply a third layer in a random manner, but without too much pressure.  After you've covered one or two metres, go back into this with what we call "half a hand" - a small amount of material on a clean trowel, and re-work what you've covered.  Then move on and apply the first layer to another metre or so.  While this is taking up, drop back and polish the first section.
5. Depending on whether you're working alone or with another person, polishing starts when the marmorino is about 50% dry.  This can either be done with a hot or cold trowel, depending on how much polish you require.

Personally, with marmorino veneziano, I don't like it to be too highly polished.  If you don't have a polishing iron (the type used for stucco caldo) simply use a hot-air gun to heat the blade of your polishing trowel, but this needs to be used at a very specific point - it's run over the surface of the marmorino very lightly but really brings out a deep polish.

After this, the way of treating the surface depends on the look you're trying to achieve.  While the surface is still wet (within 8-10 hours), but before 24 hours, apply two layers of Marseilles soap - one horizontally with a brush, then one vertically.  This is a home-made mixture, not the sort of thick, trowel-applied soaps that you can buy.  Once dry, you can buff this with a soft cloth.

There are other ways of finishing, like encaustic wax, etc, but if you're interested in these drop me a line and I'll be happy to expand.

I just came back from a hectic week in Dublin, stuccoing the new Omega shop that's opening in Brown Thomas.  It's one of those projects that isn't very big, but has lots of detail and will be viewed at really close range.  The finish is a pale stucco lucido so the application has to be absolutely flawless.

I applied a marmorino base followed by five layers of stucco in the traditional stucco veneziano style, with very neat, short sharp strokes.  It was then polished to within a millimetre of its life - normally with marmorino and stucco finishes you just see the polish when you look at the surface side-on, but with this, even when you look at it straight-on, you can see your reflection.

Photos to come shortly.

On freehand modelling...

...here's a curved wall in a foyer we did over the summer.  It's weird how the lighting makes the wall appear almost russet; in daylight it is pistachio green.  Pistachios are a bit of a theme for me today.  I opened a 300g packet earlier and literally cannot step away.  I digress.

The freehand modelling of the world map was a lot of fun to do.  We worked from an atlas, but then found that something about the way the globe has to be flattened to appear on a printed page made it easy to skew the outer edges - Australia and the Arctic Circle were a bit tricky.  And once you start with the island groups you can never stop.  Anyway, we were pleased with how it turned out.

 

Not just walls.

 Since the start of the year, we've been experimenting with using marmorino for sculpture and raised relief, as well as introducing metals and glass.  So why stop at walls?  Look out for screens and furniture - we'll be launching one-off pieces soon.

Omega, Brown Thomas, Dublin

Yesterday we started work on the new Omega store in Brown Thomas.  I checked out their website, and saw that the face of Omega is that suave and urbane gent George Clooney, so we know this company is no Casio.  (Not that there's anything wrong with Casio; my first ever watch was a Knight Rider-themed digital model of theirs which I remember fondly, and its demise beneath my brother's pram wheels still rankles).  Anyhow, I digress.

This is the first ever Omega boutique in Ireland, and it will be finished in a rich, buttery cream stucco lucido. It's a very beautiful finish.  Just right to showcase some luxury Swiss timepieces.

Windmill Lane Studio

Yesterday we put the final touches to the work we've been doing to the world-renowned Windmill Lane studio at their new premises in Herbert Street, Dublin.

We were commissioned to create some very individual finishes, which were applied to walls, ceilings and three-dimensional installations.

This project brought its own challenges - working with so many creative people: the architects, the studio owners, the interior designers, and because we can create virtually any colour and finish, it took us all some time to choose which finish would be perfect for the space.

But as usual, the end result is amazing.  We agreed on a palette of ambiguous, cusp colours which really work with the light and shape of the design.

Of course, artistic finishes are not always to everyone's taste.  Let's just say we had some "mixed" feedback from some of the trades.  But we'll put our photographs up and you can be the jury.

Fresco Marmorino

We've recently developed another polished plaster technique which is based on an old method: fresco marmorino.  The application of the pigments is exactly the same, however we have adjusted the marmorino base so that we apply the pigment over a pitted and veiled surface which has been polished.  You can increase the depth of the finish by building up three or four layers of colour.

The result is really effective. Here's how it turned out on this feature wall which we did in December.  The rich burnt orange marmorino really seems to glow.

The Legendary Carlo Scarpa

I've always intended to spend some time visiting what I could of the works of Carlo Scarpa, in particular to admire the stucco work and pick up some ideas.  In October I was fortunate enough to do just that: I spent a week in Venice with my good friend Sam, a decorative painter who's a fantastic applicator of marmorino too.  We were able to visit the Olivetti showroom, the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia and the Castelvecchio in Verona.

To say that I returned inspired would be a serious understatement.  What excites me most about how Scarpa used these materials was just how contemporary the finishes look.  Although they're ancient techniques, when you compare how they're applied on a Scarpa building with how they are used elsewhere in Venice, they are very different.

One finish that Carlo Scarpa seemed to use a lot - and it's not immediately obvious in photos of his work, but you can spot it straight away when you see his work in the flesh - is encausto, a technique that involves applying stucco lucido over a coarse intonachino.  This is the finish used on the ceiling in the Olivetti showroom, where it ties in perfectly with concrete and stone that's used nearby.  It is also used in the Castelvecchio on panels like this one.  Again, Scarpa used this encausto technique in the Querini-Stampalia, however here the intonachino is much coarser, and the craftsmen used much more force when applying the final layers, so there is a lot more visible granulation.

Another technique that Carlo Scarpa used a lot was spatula-applied stucco lucido, especially on ceilings - a finish of which I was not a huge fan until recently - but when you see it in this setting, it just works so well.  There is virtually no variation in colour whatsoever, which I've always preferred.

It's amazing that although these buildings were completed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, their design really catches you, they are so unique.

The trip has brought one thing home to me: there will never be a wall finish that has the same range of design possibilities as marmorino.  It is truly timeless.

Marmorino motifs

During our last few projects, we've had the opportunity to do raised relief in marmorino.

There are different methods of carrying this out - the traditional method is stucco forte, which means adding a small amount of gypsum (or as the Italians call it, gesso) to marmorino.  This accelerates the set and means that the surface can be built up and modelled freehand.

If you want to produce quite a heavy build-up to the design, you can draw the design out in pencil, then use brass screws and copper wire to form a frame over which lime plaster, followed by marmorino, can be applied.

For bas-relief, this can be done simply with marmorino that has had a small amount of gypsum added.

White Book - Essential Interiors

The project we carried out for Garuda Design at Killeen Castle has been featured in this issue of The White Book.  The White Book comes out twice a year and features several of the most luxurious interiors in Ireland.  The article on Killeen Castle is illustrated with some beautiful photography of the spine wall with the embedded motif and the Carrara marmorino finish surrounding the swimming pool.

New-look website!

After five months of fine-tuning, our new website is finally up at www.pdmarlow.com.  Have a look, see some of our latest photos and above all, please give us your comments!

29 Pall Mall, SW1

Paul and Mark recently spent a week working on a project on Pall Mall in London's City of Westminster.  The classic marmorino finish looked beautiful in the soft tobacco shade that the designer had chosen.

Last weekend we were back in London and couldn't resist having another look at how it had turned out.  Work isn't completely finished there yet so the building wasn't open so we peered in through the windows and had some explaining to do when one of the owners came out to investigate these two shady characters with their noses pressed up against the glass...