Notes on how coatings, substrates and finishes actually behave — written for anyone deciding what to do with a surface.
These are explanatory pieces rather than project records. Our completed work is in the case studies.
A house near the bay doesn't weather as a house. It weathers as elevations, each on its own clock. Knowing why one wall fails years before another is most of what separates a repaint that holds from one you do again too soon.
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Conventional paint puts colour on a wall. Limewash and mineral paints put it in one. Nearly everything people notice about these finishes — the depth, the movement through the day, the fact that no two walls come out the same — follows from that.
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Paint failure often begins somewhere beneath the finish coat. It fails at one of the joins beneath it — where coating meets substrate, where one coating meets another, or inside a layer that had already given up. The finish coat is the part everyone sees, but much of its longevity is decided before it goes on.
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