What We Do
Siena · Within 120 kmWe take walls back to what they were made of. Kvoesco is a workshop of four in Siena. We strip cement and plastic paint off old stone and brick, slake and age our own lime putty in pits in the yard, lay new plaster by hand in three coats, wash it in earth pigments, and clean, consolidate and patiently infill frescoes in farmhouses, town houses, oratories and small chapels within about 120 km of the city, the way the walls were first made and the way they will need to be mended again in two hundred years.
Plaster, the Old Way
Three coats of lime laid by hand on stone and brick, each left to take up before the next goes on, then washed in the earth of the hills around Siena.
Three coats
An old Tuscan wall was never meant to be sealed. Its stone and brick take in rain and give it back, and the plaster over them has to do the same. We lay it the way the masons of the town did: a spatter coat of wet lime and coarse sand thrown hard into the joints, then the arriccio, ten to fifteen millimetres of lime and river sand floated flat and scratched for key, and last the intonaco, aged putty and sieved sand laid one day's patch at a time and closed with the steel trowel while it is still green.
Kept where sound
Each coat waits for the one below. Nothing is hurried, and nothing goes on that the wall will have to fight later: no cement, no gypsum skim, no plastic paint over the top. Where the old plaster is sound we keep it, and patch only what is hollow or lost, matching the sand to what the first masons used.
Washed in earth
Over the finished wall goes lime wash, two coats of slaked lime coloured with natural earths: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, green earth, the grey of wood ash. It dries lighter than it goes on and chalks gently with the years, which is how you know the wall is still breathing.
What it costs
New three-coat plaster on old stone or brick runs €72 to €98 per m², depending on how far out of true the wall is. Patch repair of historic plaster is €420 per conservator-day, lime and sand included. Lime wash in two coats is €24 to €32 per m².
Frescoes, Kept and Not Repainted
Most painted walls we are called to are not lost, only buried. The work is to uncover what is there, hold it to the wall, and show plainly where it is gone.
Cleaning
Under soot from a century of candles, under salts pushed out by damp, under whitewash put on in a fever year or because the plaster had begun to flake, the paint is usually still there. We clean with poultices of paper pulp and clay soaked in deionised water, laid on for minutes or hours and lifted away, then with soft brushes and scalpels under a lens, a hand's width at a time.
Consolidation
Where the painted plaster has come away from the wall behind it, we find the hollow by tapping, make a hair-fine hole inside an existing loss, and inject a lime grout that sets in the dark and holds the skin back to the stone. No resin goes into a wall that has to breathe.
Honest infill
A lost hand or face is never painted back from imagination. Small losses are filled with lime and toned in tratteggio, fine vertical strokes that close up at a distance and come apart when you step close, so whoever comes after us can see what is ours. Large losses are plastered flush and left a quiet tone.
What it costs
Cleaning and consolidation runs €700 to €1,600 per m², fixed in writing after the survey. Tratteggio infill is €55 per hour at the wall.
Why Lime, and Only Lime
Livia founded the bottega in 2007, after nine years as an apprentice on church walls across Tuscany.
Half the farmhouses of the Crete Senesi were rendered in cement in the 1970s, when it was cheap and modern and everybody's cousin had a mixer, and the render did exactly what it was asked to do: it kept the rain off the face of the wall. What it also did was keep the water in. A stone wall drinks from the ground and from the air, and for four hundred years it breathed that water back out through soft lime. Shut it behind cement and the water stays, the salts come up behind the skin, and the stone, the soft sandstone and tufa of these hills, slowly turns to sugar, so that you can rub it out with your thumb. Near Asciano we took the render off a house and it came away in one piece like a shell, a metre and a half of it, hollow behind, and the stone underneath was wet in August. My own grandfather's kitchen wall sweated every winter of my childhood, a dark tide line at the height of the table that my grandmother painted over each spring, and nobody thought to ask why until I took the cement off it in 2009 and laid lime, and the wall was dry by Christmas and has stayed dry since. That is all lime is: a material that lets a wall do what it was built to do. It is slower, it needs a week of misting, it cannot go on in frost, and it costs more by the square metre than a render out of a bag. We still will not put anything else on an old wall, and I would rather lose the job than put back the thing that was killing the house.
LiviaWhere the Calendar Stands
Three figures that move through the year, set down as they stand now. The rest is on the rate card.
14-20weeks
From a signed quote to our first morning on your wall. Surveys come round faster, usually booked within three weeks of your first message.
Rates & TermsAprto Oct
Lime goes on outside only from April to October, never below 5 °C or in a forecast frost. Interiors run all year, apart from our closure from 23 December to 7 January.
Rates & Terms€180credited
A site survey and written condition report with photographs, within 40 km of Siena, credited in full against the job if you go ahead. The smallest job we take is two conservator-days, €840.
Rates & TermsSeven Jobs We Say No To
Each of these is asked of us every year, usually kindly and sometimes with money on the table. Here is why the answer stays the same.
Cement is harder and tighter than the stone it sits on, so in any argument between them the stone loses. Even a little in a mix seals the face and drives the damp sideways into the masonry. We take cement off old walls; we never put it on.
Acrylic and silicone masonry paints make a film that holds water behind it until it blisters, and when it peels it takes the lime with it. Gypsum skim softens and lets go on a damp wall within a few winters. If a wall wants colour, it gets lime wash in earth pigments.
A fresco belongs to the wall it was painted on and the room it was painted for. We will hold it in place however long that takes, but we will not lift it off to hang in someone else's hall or to be sold.
Nobody alive knows what the missing face looked like, and guessing it in paint puts a fiction into the saint's own wall. Losses are infilled in tratteggio, or plastered flush and left honest, so the next conservator can tell the old from the new.
We understand why it is asked; the walls of Tuscany are what people come for. But our hands and our lime go to real walls, and a painted imitation of age is the opposite of what the bottega is here to do.
Lime hardens by slowly taking carbon back out of the air, and the seven days of misting after laying are not something we can shorten. Lime laid outside below 5 °C or ahead of a frost will crumble by spring, so exterior work stops at the end of October.
Four people cannot be everywhere, and a crew that drives three hours each way is a tired crew at the wall. The exception is a chapel nobody else will take on. If that is yours, write to us anyway.