Services / 02

Historic Restoration & Ornate Plaster

Winnipeg has a heritage building stock worth keeping. Restoring ornamental plaster means understanding how it was made in the first place.

The Exchange District, Wolseley, Armstrong Point, and hundreds of century homes across the city have ornamental ceilings that a previous owner covered in stipple, or lost entirely to a plumbing repair. That work can come back.

Ornamental plaster was made two ways, and a restoration has to know which it is looking at. Cornices and mouldings were run in place: a plasterer cut a profile from sheet metal, mounted it on a horse, and dragged it along a rail through wet plaster until the moulding stood up in the corner of the room. Enrichments such as rosettes, medallions, corbels and egg-and-dart were cast in reverse moulds and fixed up afterward.

What we do

We take a profile off a surviving length of cornice, cut a knife to match it, and run the replacement in place so the repair is continuous with the original rather than a straight length of stock butted against it. For lost enrichments we pull a mould off an intact original on the same ceiling and cast replacements in gypsum. Where a ceiling has begun to sag we re-key it, securing the plaster back to sound lath before any cosmetic work starts.

Material matters here. Original plaster on lath is lime-based and moves; patching it with modern gypsum sets up a hard spot that cracks along its own edge within a few seasons. Where the original mix matters we match it.

Working on a designated property

Heritage-designated buildings carry conservation requirements, and the work usually needs documenting before, during and after. We survey the condition, photograph and record profiles, and produce the documentation an approval process asks for. Reversibility and minimum intervention are the guiding principles: repair before replace, and replace only what is beyond repair.

Before you call

Photograph the ceiling straight on and at a raking angle, and photograph any area where the plaster has come away. If there is water involved, find and stop the source first. Plaster restoration in a wall that is still wet is money spent twice.

The Method