Because they comprised layers of dense plaster, pre-war buildings tend to have rock-hard walls, as anyone in New York City who’s tried to hang art or a mirror in one can attest.īut building a plaster wall or applying a plaster wall finish is a labor-intensive process, and when World War II started, labor was scarce. It’s stone.” Heidi’s Bridgeīefore World War II, most homes had interior walls made of plaster, constructed using the now obsolete scratch-and-lath method, where coats of plaster are applied to a board made of horizontal strips of wood. “It’s a healthy interior environment,” said Foster Reeve, whose company, Foster Reeve and Associates, does plaster wall finishes and moldings, among other things. If a building needs to be quiet, like a library, architects might use acoustical plaster walls because they absorb sound. It’s also used in curvilinear design and for ornamental moldings. In addition to wall finishes, plaster today is often used to construct surfaces that need to be hard, such as a squash court. Plaster wall finishes generally last longer than paint jobs or wallpaper do after plaster dries, it hardens, stone-like, similar to its original form as raw limestone or gypsum. The underlying material of plaster is naturally occurring limestone and gypsum, so a plaster wall finish is, quite literally, a coating of earth for your walls. It can’t support the growth of mold, and it has no impact on a landfill. Plaster is also an eco-friendly product that doesn’t emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are bad for air quality, like some paints do.

The people who go for it often times do enjoy the more artisanal experience.” “You can add more pigments and different sheens to get an overall look. “With Venetian plaster, there’s a method of painting where you get a much more rich finish throughout your whole place,” says Saoli Chu, lead designer at Block Renovation. Venetian plaster, which is a polished-plaster mixed with marble dust, gives a wall the illusion of depth on a flat surface. There’s also an artistic quality to a plaster wall finish: It is hand-applied by an artisan, which can leave traces of brush strokes and variation in textures. After mixing the powder with water, it’s coated onto a wall or board using a trowel.īecause it’s so durable, designers and architects can use a plaster finish on interior and exterior walls, giving a home a strong connection to the outdoors and a cohesive and holistic look throughout. Different additives, like sand or marble, are added to the powder to give the resulting plaster different textures and colors. It’s mined, cooked, and ground into a powder. Plaster is typically made from limestone (calcium carbonate) or gypsum (calcium sulfate).

“It’s one of the things that I think people have a hard time with in new construction the whole cold, clean regularity of all of the surfaces.”Ī post shared by Samuel Fellay on at 3:29am PDT “What’s attracting people to plaster today is the ability to have a little bit of surface variation, to have more character in this otherwise flat surface,” said Los Angeles architect Emily Farnham. With technology advances and experimentation giving plaster color palette and texture options as broad as paint, plaster is helping designers and architects break the dull uniformity of walls-the thing that plaster made possible in the first place. We sought to find out what’s driving this trend. The plaster finishes in the renovated Pennsylvania farmhouse recently featured in Curbed’s House Calls column give the walls a coarse texture that matches its rustic feel. Plaster wall finishes have popped up lately in projects by influential designers and architects across the country, and we’ve seen homeowners showing off their newly renovated plaster wall finishes on Instagram. Plaster produced perfectly flat, uniform walls before the dimensions of lumber were standardized in 1924.Īs the saying goes, everything old is new again: Plaster wall finishes have quietly become the preferred choice for high-end home renovations, replacing other options like paint, wallpaper, or exposed brick. Its popularity across human history has been driven by how easy it is to manipulate-and its incredible durability. In more modern times, it featured prominently in residential construction in the United States before World War II. Plaster has been a go-to construction material since, at least, the time of the ancient Egyptians.

White venetian plaster paint