Choosing paint, paper or a specialist finish

Three different jobs that often share one brief

A room brief in these houses usually arrives as a colour. The useful first question is which surface is actually being changed. Flat emulsion on sound plaster is interior painting. A patterned or textured wallcovering, hung over a lined ground, is wallpaper. A burnished mineral surface, a seamless cement coating or a mirror lacquer is a specialist finish, and it is specified as its own craft. Putting all three on one line in a quotation hides the preparation, the drying and the sample each one needs. This hub is for separating them before anyone orders a drum or a roll.

Interior painting covers walls, ceilings and the joinery that lives in the room: skirtings, doors, architraves, shutters and the staff beads of a sash that is being decorated from the inside. It is the right page when the ground is plaster or an existing paint film and the result should be a maintainable sheen you can touch up later. Wallpaper is the right page when the design is in the paper, including a feature wall, a full room, a stair or a wide-width mural, and when the wall is uneven enough that lining paper has to go on first. Specialist finishes are the right page when a flat coating cannot give the surface the brief describes, and when a sample board the size of a postcard would lie about the movement of tone.

Many Hampstead and North London houses need more than one of these on the same job. A reception can be painted, a chimney breast papered, and a hall given a polished plaster. They should still be three lines. The painter cuts in to the edge of the paper. The paperhanger needs the painted ground beside the drop to be finished, or deliberately left, before the paste is open. The plasterer needs a stable ground and a room that is not being sanded the same day. Sequence is part of the choice, not an afterthought once the colours have been picked.

What changes the choice in a period room

Lime plaster on a solid wall, common in Hampstead, Redington and Frognal, Belsize, Fitzjohn's and Netherhall, and South Hill Park, does not behave like a new skim on plasterboard. A vinyl film can hold moisture in the solid wall. A clay or mineral coating can be honest only if the wall has not already been sealed. Wallpaper needs that same diagnosis, because a damp wall will push a paper off whatever the adhesive. Polished plaster and tadelakt are not a way to hide a lower-ground wall on Well Walk or Flask Walk that is still drying. If the brief is really a moisture problem, none of the three decorative pages is the first specification. The conservation guide is the place to read the constraint. The service page is the place to read the craft.

Joinery decides the interior painting page more often than the colour card does. Box sash rooms on Church Row, Downshire Hill and Fitzjohn's Avenue need the glazing line and the meeting rail kept free even when the instruction is rooms only. Shutters are coated open and checked shut. A papered room still has those windows, and the paper stops at a cut line the joiner can live with. A lacquered door or a polished plaster pier is a different tolerance: raking light from a tall sash will show a ripple that emulsion would have forgiven. Say which of those you are looking at before you compare quotations.

Light in these streets is part of the specification. North-facing rooms, and rooms under the trees of a Suburb avenue or Frognal, shift a pigment that looked warm on a card. Sample boards for paint belong on the wall that will be coated, morning and evening. Papers with a large repeat need the repeat calculated before the order, especially around a chimney breast that is out of square. Specialist finishes need a sample large enough to show burnish and sheen, viewed in the same light. A small swatch is not a substitute on any of the three.

How to use the three pages

Open interior painting if the work is walls, ceilings and woodwork, including breathable systems on lime plaster and a normal eggshell or emulsion sheen. Open wallpaper hanging if you already have a paper in mind, or if you need lining, set-out and a plumb line rather than a corner trusted as vertical. Open specialist finishes if the words in the brief are polished plaster, microcement, tadelakt or a high-gloss lacquer, and if you can accept a sample stage before a whole room is committed. If the outside of the same house is in the brief, that is a different hub: masonry, sash windows and heritage coatings are not priced as extra rooms.

Each service page states what is included, what is priced as its own line after survey, and the questions that come up for that craft. The written quotation still follows a look at the actual rooms. Use this page to decide which craft you are buying, then use the service page to see how that craft is specified. Colour consultation sits alongside all three when the uncertainty is the hue rather than the material.