A small London studio painting houses, restaurants and stage sets in the way they used to be painted: with lime, casein and oil glaze, by hand, from a card of mixed pigments. The plates that follow are twelve commissions from the past two years.
Saffron & Slate is a London studio of three decorative painters working out of a converted dairy off Portland Road. We paint walls, ceilings, panelling, stage flats, restaurant rooms and the occasional door, using lime and casein paints we make ourselves from a card of ninety-six pigments.
The house was founded in 2012 by Mira Saffron and Elsa Slate, both formerly of the Royal Opera House paint shop. We are deliberately small. We take six commissions a year, never more, and we walk every commission together before we cost it.
We do not do spray-finish, or vinyl, or trompe l'œil on demand. We do work in lime, casein, oil glaze, distemper, gilding and patination — and the longer the wall has been waiting, the more interested we tend to be.
Twelve coats of distemper in our S·09 Faded Coral, with mouldings picked out in S·12 Slate Rose and gilded inset panels in 23-carat Italian leaf. Four weeks on the wall, two of which we spent breaking the colour with a sponge of dirty linen.
Walls in S·38 Night Slate distemper, ceiling rose hand-painted in stone-grey on a black ground, and the cornice gilded in 23ct as a single line. The room is fifty square metres; the cornice took longer than the walls.
Four landscape panels in S·15 Verdigris on a casein ground, after a Pompeiian fragment. We made the casein on site from skimmed milk and quicklime, and we let the verdigris develop in the panels themselves under damp linen for ten days.
Pine panelling broken with a fine wood-grain glaze in S·31 Sealed Oak, three coats hand-rubbed with linen. The owner asked us to make the room look as if it had been there since 1840; we hope we did not quite succeed.
We answer every letter by hand. The first conversation is usually short; if it is plain we are right for the room, we then visit it. We charge nothing for the first visit, and we usually pay for the train.
We are slow. The waiting list runs at six months in early summer and shortens through the autumn. Twelve commissions a year, never thirteen.
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Share the room, its light and any materials or colours you want to keep.