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Building materials in Brighton and Hove

Stucco

All photos by Ron Martin

Close-up of stucco

Decorative stucco

Stucco scored to look like stone

Stucco

By Ron Martin

1. Stucco is a plastering material
Stucco is a plastering material used to cover the external face of buildings. The object of the exercise being to produce a surface which looked like stone which of course required a lot of money, so the cheap way was was to use stucco.

2. Simulating the joints of stonework
This would be applied to the face of the wall and even a plain face would have the surface scratched with horizontal and vertical lines to simulate the joints of stonework.

3. Lower storeys were rusticated
Traditionally the lower storeys of major buildings were emphasised and this was known as rustication and it is done by recessing the joints of the stonework - or stucco - either all the joints or just the horizontal joints. This would be known as banded rustication.

4. Stucco is also used decoratively
Stucco is also used in the various decorative features that became such a feature of nineteenth century buildings, particularly door-openings. One would also sometimes emphasise the corners of walls with rustications where the rest of the faces are plain.

5. Stucco was often painted
Traditionally stucco, which became the normal method of covering wall faces from about 1830 onwards, was painted and in, for example, Brunswick Square, the colour was laid down by the Brunswick town commissioners and the result is that when you look at Brunswick Square all the colour is more or less the same.

Image and text from the 1994 My Brighton museum exhibit

This page was added on 22/03/2006.

Comments about this page

Nice pages and very informative. I'd like to add a note about modern stucco. Unfortunately, stucco today comprises Portland Cement with some lime in it, sand and water. Portland Cement is the substance that makes stucco brittle such that it will crack easily and fail especially in wet, humid climates like the South Coast of England. Traditional stucco was lime and sand based (with the occasional egg and amounts of horse hair for reinforcement thrown in for good measure). It is this traditional lime-based stucco WITHOUT Portland Cement that actually lasts and performs well as an exterior render for buildings. Lime has a property called micro-crystalline bridging which means that when a building moves slightly, the lime is self-repairing at microscopic scales. Also, lime breathes allowing moisture in the walls to escape outward. Portland Cement suffocates a building acting like a giant plastic bag causing any absorbed moisture through its cracks to be entrapped. The moisture's only exit route is INTO the building. This in turn creates ideal conditions for black mould and mildew - perfect agents for rotting a building prematurely and also killing or inuring it's inhabitants. So, if you are going to stucco - use Lime and sand (with water) only. Avoid Portland Cement in stucco as well as mortars wherever possible - even though TV do-it-yourselfers and the local hardware stores will likely tell you otherwise - as they do here in the US where stucco's performance is truly abysmal (because it is invariably Portland Cement based).

By Phil Allsopp (07/07/2009)