DECORATIVE HISTORY
Decorative plasterwork dates back centuries and is known to have been used in the making of pyramids in Egypt. It was seized with vigour by the Romans, who fancifully fashioned the interiors and exteriors of impressive buildings, filling them with statues, busts and other ornamentation over centuries, and was an aesthetic reproduced across the wealthier establishments in Europe.
In 1856, fibrous plaster of Paris was patented in France, replacing the more costly, time-consuming, lime-based plaster, which was laboriously crafted by hand in situ. It was a great architectural innovation, revolutionising and popularising more widespread use in initially elite and commercial properties in Britain, but used widely throughout the heyday of Victorian and Edwardian music halls and theatres, where lavish designs were in keeping with whimsical sets, costumes and theatre productions.
By the turn of the 20th century, this trend to embellish spread to hotels, restaurants, clubs, public buildings and private residences. It became easier and cheaper to mass produce, off-site, ornate decorations for walls and ceilings, moulded panels, cornices, ceiling centres, niches and decorative picture and dado rails. Gentlemen’s grand town and country houses wore major lavish designs but at the beginning of the 20th century, the fashion spilled over into less grand middle-class homes, which wore, albeit simpler, plasterwork features.
The First and Second World Wars halted its spread, and the emphasis later returned to the restoration and repair of decorative works of historic and public buildings. The 1950s and 1960s enjoyed a simplification in style, with cleaner, minimalist interiors, only to revert back to decoration with the onset of gentrification, which saw openedup back rooms and parlours styled to mirror their more decorative front rooms.
While fashions may come and go, there seems to always be a place for decorative plasterwork designs for buildings, ensuring the perpetuation of this skilled craft.
In the Classic Cornice Company shop are stacks of ceiling roses, used as a decorative element to encase a cable and fitting where a light is suspended from the ceiling.
Accelerating and decelerating compounds can be added to both powders. “We use accelerators if we need to knock lots of relatively small pieces out of a small mould, or decelerators, which buy us extra time when moulding something large and complex,” says Ben. The company gets through approximately 220st (1,400kg) of plaster powder each week, amounting to somewhere in the region of 70 tons per year.
The other essential, traditional ‘ingredient’, which remains in the actual plasterwork, is natural hessian webbing, which enmeshes and strengthens the plaster, and there are also built-in wooden laths, essential for installation.
A rose in the making
Helen Manley is a dexterous ceramics graduate, who is working on an entirely bespoke ceiling rose. The whole process depends initially on a successfully designed, well-made mould created by a skilled modeller. Using the architect’s drawings or given dimensions for size, she sculpts a three-dimensional ceiling rose design, spilling with fruit and flowers, in clay, which is used to make a model. Once the model has been made, it is encased before liquid silicone rubber is poured over the model, flooding and capturing its every detail. The silicone rubber takes a minimum of 24 hours to set, after which it can be gently peeled away and then used to produce a wonderful ceiling centrepiece.
“Sometimes ceiling roses arrive in pieces, covered in years of paint,” says Ben. “By immersing them in a hot tub of water, the paint can be softened, then small dentist’s tools are used to pick and remove the paint. It’s a really therapeutic process.” Using a simple ‘small tool’, which is similar in appearance to a tiny bricklayer’s implement, and by piecing together, crafting, and infilling missing elements, the rose is returned to its former glory, and a mould can then be made. If, by luck, the ceiling rose arrives at the workshop in once piece, a mould of that existing design can be replicated and replaced. “A coat of paint, and you would think it had always been there,” adds Ben.
Wall meets ceiling
Ornate cornices come into the workshop in pieces or sections removed from site. These sections are cleaned, just like the ceiling roses. Moulds can then be made of the ornate motifs or sections, which are then cast and laid on a plain-run cornice model and ‘made good’ by piecing together, crafting and infilling missing elements, sprayed with a release agent. The model can then be boxed with wood on both sides and the ends, so that the cavity can be filled with silicone rubber to make
the mould. It is left to harden in preparation for a length of ornate cornice to be cast.
Ben begins reproducing a plain cornice by making a zinc template of the desired cornice profile. “Zinc is malleable and easy to cut and shape,” he explains. He then creates a ‘running mould’ or ‘slipper’ to which he fixes the template. As he runs the mould along the bench, the layering process begins back and forth, with the running mould building the model with layers of plaster until he has achieved the chosen shape.
If the design of the ceiling centre or cornice is not too intricate, fibreglass moulds can be used instead of rubber. These need to be lined with a coating of tallow to help ease out the finished cornice, whereas rubber can quite literally be pulled away: otherwise, the process is the same. After 30 minutes, the fibreglass mould can be carefully removed, and then the cornice is upended and left to dry for a further 24 hours. Roses and other smaller decorative pieces are laid flat to dry.
Casting and installation
The selected mould is placed on a circular dais or on dedicated, long workbenches in the back room. Powdered plaster is slowly sprinkled into large buckets, half-filled with water, and mixed by hand, stirring well with a wooden baton before being scooped up into a smaller, plastic splash bowl. The plasterer, bowl in one hand, a natural hair ‘splash brush’ in the other, begins working the ‘firstings’. “This is the first firm brush-over,” explains Ben, “then you run your fingers down the ‘arris’, or sharp-edged intersection, and brush over again until every crack and crevice of the design is covered, critically pushing out all the air bubbles and lining the mould in its entirety.”
This first layer needs to be perfect. This is what our clients ultimately will see,” adds Ben. “It must be worked in hard, which also helps strengthen the piece.”
After the firm brush-over comes the repeated ‘splash,’ as the plasterer builds up fine layers of plaster, working quickly as the mixture begins to dry and set within minutes. “It’s not an exact science, so this is where experience comes in,” says Ben. When the required thickness is achieved – a balance between strength and weight – the surface is dusted with plaster powder to ‘set it off’, and a precut piece of hessian, either circular or rectangular, according to the object, is laid over the plaster and gently firmed in, ensuring that the webbing doesn’t ‘grin’ through to the front-facing edge. The hessian strengthens the plaster and helps to hold it all together. This process is repeated until the length of cornice or ceiling rose is at the required thickness. Finally, wooden ‘laths’ are laid in the top and bottom underside edges of the cornice or ceiling centre, and a final layer of hessian and a light splash of plaster tidies up the back. “We’re always thinking about the finished product, which includes the installation,”
“There is no excuse for doing anything which is not strikingly beautiful”
William Morris