Finishes

Eight surfaces, mixed to the room.

Plaster that looks right in a shop looks like something else under a restaurant's lamps. Every job starts with samples made on site, in the room's own light, and nothing goes on a wall until you have seen it where it will live.

01

Venetian plaster

Burnished lime built up in thin coats and compressed with a steel trowel until it takes a low, stone-like sheen. It has depth you cannot fake with paint — the surface reads differently as you cross the room. Our most-requested finish, and the one most often specified wrong: it wants a flat, sound substrate and a schedule that lets each coat cure.

Polished Walls, columns, soffits
02

Japanese plaster

Clay and natural fiber, left dead matte. Where Venetian reflects, this absorbs — it makes a room quieter and photographs like paper. Good in dining rooms where you want the light to come from the fixtures rather than the walls.

Matte Dining rooms, bedrooms
03

Tadelakt

Lime polished with stone and sealed with olive-oil soap — waterproof without a coating, and seamless, so there is no grout line to fail. The Moroccan bath finish, and the reason it keeps appearing in restaurant restrooms: it survives water and looks like nothing else.

Waterproof Baths, showers, wet bars
04

Gold leaf

Genuine and composition leaf, laid by hand over size or directly onto plaster. Used as stroke rather than field — a ceiling coffer, a reveal, a band behind a bar — because gold does its work in small quantities and stops working in large ones.

Gilding Ceilings, reveals, ornament
05

Murals

Painted scenes and ornament worked out from your drawings or ours, directly on plaster so the image and the wall are one surface. Sampled at full scale on a panel before we commit to the room.

Hand-painted Stairs, ceilings, feature walls
06

Lime wash

Breathable, cloudy, and the most forgiving of the family — it moves with an old building instead of fighting it, and it ages into something better than it started. The right answer for large areas on a real budget.

Breathable Large areas, older buildings
07

Color matching

Pigment mixed to a swatch, a stone, a piece of the floor, or a photograph of somewhere you once stayed. Matched in the room, not from a fan deck, and recorded so the same color can be mixed again in five years for a repair.

Custom Every job
08

Restoration

Repair and matching on older decorative work — running new cornice to an existing profile, patching plaster so the seam disappears, re-gilding what has gone dull. Half of a good restoration is deciding what to leave alone.

Repair Landmark and pre-war
How a job runs

Four steps, and none of them skipped.

Managed in JobsOxo, so you can see where your job stands without calling to ask.

01 Walk & sample We see the room, take the light, and make samples on site — not in a shop.
02 Substrate Prep and repair. Most plaster failures are substrate failures wearing a nice coat.
03 Install Our own crew, coat by coat, with cure time built into the schedule rather than borrowed from it.
04 Punch & record Walk-through, touch-up, and the color formula filed so a repair years from now still matches.

Not sure which finish the room wants?

That is the conversation we like having, and it is free.

Request a consultation