PLASTERWORK ~ INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL

Internal

The repair of the three great fire damaged buildings; Uppark House, Prior Park and Windsor Castle and the re-construction of the King’s Apartments at Edinburgh Castle re-defined our understanding of the conservation, repair, and renewal of Traditional Solid Plain and Decorative Plasterwork. St Blaise worked on all 4 of these projects and had teams of up to 30 people working on Prior Park and Windsor Castle

St Blaise has won the Plaisterer’s Trophy

St Blaise has worked on every conceivable type of plasterwork from the conservation of surviving Roman plasters Roman Baths to the most contemporary. We are fascinated by how fashion drove technology’s development to culminate in the extraordinary achievement of the Georgian Triumph, and how those very advances heralded the terminal decline of the plasterer’s craft as the spectacular work of the freehand modeler became available to all as cast and applied work designed for mass production

Internal Plasterwork Case Studies

External

The surface treatment of Historic Buildings makes our landscape and is characterised by local geology, tradition, fashion, and the extremities of weather. Renders, stuccos, roughcasts, harls, and even dashes of all kind, wet, dry or pebble… are part of this tradition. These coverings weather very differently and their appearance is a direct function of the materials they are made of. Preserving these regional variations is an important part of St Blaise’s work, and is only successful thro’ a thorough understanding of materials and the traditional techniques used to apply them.

However not all work is so unselfconscious and the disciplined stucco of Wakefield Lodge or the Roman Cement of Highcliffe Castle shows how plasters and renders were used consciously to give the grander buildings an illusion of rising above the commonality of the local vernacular

Renders, Harls & Roughcasts Case Studies