Casts From the Past II

Casts From the Past is a recurring retrospective of select Palladio GFRG projects.

Creating a perfectly symmetrical finial for a cornice is, as they say, easy if you know how. The secret is pictured here. The profile of the finial is snipped out of sheet metal and then spun around a lump of semi-solid plaster. Once dry, the final (finial?) details are carved by hand.

Despite the use of plaster being many millennia old, even modern spaces benefit from its addition, as our fluted wall panels amply demonstrate in the Versace at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Here’s an earlier stage of the pattern from the first Casts From the Past. The hefty support beneath was discarded once we finished putting together the various moulded profiles and made a mould.

In case you were wondering, yes, we DO spend an enormous amount of time making sure a pattern – or anything we craft in plaster – is as near perfect as possible. We start with quadruple-checking angles and proportions and continue all the way to filling tiny air bubbles and buffing out inadvertent fingerprints.

In our line of work, “breaking the mould” is usually frowned upon. Unless we’re breaking out of our classical-dominated interiors to create modern pieces  – like these 3D wall tiles for a chain of health clinics in the NY area.