Penthouse Interior, Chelsea Harbour

The Challenge

Contemporary apartments with large glazed areas and open-plan layouts are among the most unforgiving environments for painters. Every imperfection in surface preparation, every roller mark, every variation in sheen, every microscopic piece of debris trapped in the paint film is visible in the abundant natural light that floods through floor-to-ceiling windows. The open-plan living and dining area, spanning nearly twelve metres with a 2.9-metre ceiling height, required perfectly consistent colour and finish across a huge unbroken wall surface — any lap marks, dry edges, or variations in film thickness would be immediately apparent. Spray-finishing the kitchen cabinetry on-site — all 42 individual door and drawer fronts plus the visible cabinet carcass ends — demanded a completely dust-free environment in a building where other fit-out trades were still working on adjacent floors, generating airborne particulates that could contaminate the wet lacquer finish. The building's concierge and management company imposed strict delivery and working hours, goods lift booking requirements, and noise limitations that constrained our programme. The Venetian polished plaster feature wall required multiple layers of specialist Italian stucco material, each hand-trowelled and burnished to a specific degree, a technique that demands considerable skill, physical stamina, and experience to execute consistently across a large area — any inconsistency in pressure, angle, or timing produces visible variations in the finished surface.

Our Approach

We established a fully sealed spray zone around the kitchen using timber-framed temporary partitioning lined with polyethylene sheeting and fitted with a positive-pressure HEPA filtration unit that maintained a constant supply of filtered air, preventing any airborne dust from other trades entering the spray environment. The 42 cabinet doors and drawer fronts were sprayed in batches using a Graco HVLP system with a 1.3mm fine-finish tip, receiving four coats of Renner catalysed two-pack lacquer in RAL 7044 (Silk Grey) — each coat was allowed to cure for 24 hours, then hand-flatted with 1200-grit wet-and-dry paper to create a mechanical key for the subsequent coat, achieving a furniture-grade finish with a mirror-smooth surface and zero orange-peel texture. For the main living area walls and ceilings, we used a combination of spray application and back-rolling with Tikkurila Optiva 5 Matt in a custom-mixed warm grey, applying two full coats in continuous runs across the twelve-metre wall length to avoid lap marks — two painters worked in tandem, one spraying and one back-rolling, maintaining a wet edge across the entire surface. The Venetian polished plaster headboard wall was executed by our specialist plasterer over three intensive days, building five layers of Venetian Plaster Italia stucco veneziano in a warm dove grey, each layer trowelled at different angles and pressures to create the characteristic depth and luminosity, with the final layer burnished to a soft satin sheen using a flexible stainless-steel trowel. All ceiling-to-wall junctions throughout the apartment were finished with shadow gaps rather than traditional coving, demanding razor-sharp masking with 3M Fine Line tape and extremely steady hands to achieve the crisp, uninterrupted lines that define contemporary interior finishing at this level.

The Result

The finished apartment achieved the precise, gallery-quality aesthetic the owner envisioned — every wall, ceiling, and piece of joinery presented a flawless, consistent surface that served as a neutral backdrop for his contemporary art collection while feeling warm and inviting in the ever-changing Thames light. The kitchen cabinetry finish was compared favourably to factory-sprayed panels by the German kitchen designer, who noted it was among the best on-site spray finishes they had seen in twenty years of specifying bespoke kitchens and requested our details for future London projects. The polished plaster headboard wall became the centrepiece of the master suite, its subtle luminosity and depth of tone complementing the river light beautifully — the owner described it as looking different at every hour of the day. The owner, accustomed to Manhattan standards of interior finishing from his Park Avenue renovation, declared the result better than anything he had experienced in New York — a compliment our team took particular pride in. He subsequently recommended us to two other Chelsea Harbour residents, both of whom commissioned similar contemporary spray-finish projects.