Limewash On Interior Walls, Room By Room

Rooms where limewash is at its best

Bedrooms, sitting rooms, snugs and studies are the natural home for it. Contact is low, the walls are looked at rather than touched, and the soft tonal depth does exactly what it is supposed to do in evening light. In these rooms the finish tends to be the thing visitors comment on.

Dining rooms and hallways in period houses also work well, particularly on lime plaster where the mineral finish and the substrate belong together. The caveat in a hallway is contact, since shoulders, coats and bags will burnish the wash along a run over time.

• Bedrooms and guest rooms: excellent, low contact and good light
• Sitting rooms and snugs: excellent, depth reads well in low light
• Period hallways: good, expect wear along contact lines
• Kitchens: possible away from splash zones, not behind a hob
• Bathrooms: only with the right mineral system and adequate ventilation

Preparation decides whether it looks intentional

Limewash needs a porous, mineral, evenly absorbent surface. Fresh lime plaster is ideal. Sound mineral plaster works. A wall that is part filler, part old emulsion and part bare plaster will absorb at three different rates and dry to three different tones, and that will not read as charming variation. It will read as a mistake.

So the preparation is about evening out absorbency: removing incompatible coatings, making good properly with a compatible filler, and using a mineral primer where the substrate needs one. Skipping that step is the most common reason a limewashed wall disappoints.

Patch repairs made with ordinary filler will show through a limewash as pale islands. Use a compatible mineral filler.

Applying it, and why coats look different

Limewash goes on thin, with a wide brush, in cross-hatched strokes rather than rolled in straight lines. The first coat almost always looks alarming: streaky, translucent and much paler than expected while wet. It develops as it carbonates, and the colour is not fair to judge until it has dried fully.

Two coats is a typical minimum for interiors, three where the colour is deeper or the wall is uneven in absorbency. Each coat adds opacity and softens the movement of the one below. Clients who see the first coat and panic are the reason a sample area is worth doing before the main walls.

1. 1
   Assess absorbency

   Test how the wall takes water. Uneven absorbency is corrected before any wash is applied.

2. 2
   Prepare and prime

   Remove incompatible coatings, make good with compatible material, prime where needed.

3. 3
   First coat

   Applied thin and cross-hatched. Expect it to look uneven and translucent at this stage.

4. 4
   Second coat

   Applied once the first has fully dried, building depth and evening out the movement.

5. 5
   Assess in the room's light

   Judge the result at the times of day the room is used before deciding on a further coat.

Living with a limewashed interior

Dust the walls rather than washing them. Scuffs and marks are refreshed with a further coat, which is a straightforward job with no stripping, sanding or masking of the previous finish beyond the usual protection. Many owners refresh a hallway every few years and never touch a bedroom.

Because a new coat blends into the old, limewashed walls age in a way painted walls do not. There is no hard line between old and new paint, no patch that never quite matches. That forgiving quality is a large part of why the finish suits houses that get lived in hard.