Tiling on up!

Gavin has done an amazing job tiling a mini kitchen in a servants' room in the basement of the castle. He finished today, using a remaindered job lot of terracotta tiles that I located on eBay.

tiling completed

Hopefully the brick-like quality of the tiles engenders a period servant-vibe. Historic interiors can be decimated, in my opinion, by inserting modernist kitchen units. What is certain is that in 15 years time the modernist kitchen units will no longer look modernist, and will need ripping out. The ethos at Balintore is "restore once, restore properly".

I had a hard job persuading Gavin that the tiles should go above the bottom of the kitchen units, then above the top of the kitchen units, then to the top of the window frame. :-) I reckoned that taking the tiles to the ceiling would be too over-powering and interfere with any coving, but framing a cuboidal volume in which the kitchen sits, acts to zone and then characterise the space. Fortunately, when Gavin called me in at each decision point, it was pretty clear which way to go.

Gavin initially wanted to stop here

before the tiling began

Gaving suggested using some teracotta tiles when tiling a shower in the adjacent room to tie together the look, and I very much agreed with this. However, the bone-coloued crackle-glaze tiles which are also going to be used are a completely different size, and we worried about the clash. Gavin left a trial layout sitting on the worktop this afternoon, with teracotta bands dividing areas of bone tiles. What do you reckon? 

potential mixed-tile layout for shower

Surprisingly enough, because the zones are very different colours, I don't think the different tile sizes matter!

Preaching from the Converted

Is hard to believe that this classy item of furniture below is a composite of a £10 bookcase (top-half) from Curr and Dewer auction rooms in Dundee and a converted pulpit (bottom-half) from Lochee Parish Church in Dundee. Even my builder Gregor was pretty chuffed today at how his little carpentry project has worked out.

In antique circles, such an item is known as a "composite" and is generally frowned upon as being an inauthentic mongrel or indeed a Frankenstein's Monster of the furniture world. :-) Prices are correspondingly low.

However, in my view, you cannot put a value on re-using the beautiful work of ages past and building something unique that is a perfect fit for a rather low-ceilinged room in the basement of the castle. If you want to see the unit being assembled from its parts, see my previous blog entry here.

Make It Until You Fake It

While Angus Council has banned banquets of any form at Balintore Castle, one must I feel, be ready for the call when neither budgetary contraints nor bureacracy inhibit lavish largesse at scale.

To that end, over the years, I have amassed a few hundred place settings from auctions up and down the land. I look for large matching sets at bargain prices. What prompted the hunt was an emergency need for place settings, so reluctantly I popped into Birmingham IKEA en route to the castle and bought 100 plates, 100 bowls and 100 side-plates. So while the shopping trip was successful, I felt that I had failed in not biding my time and neither buying antique nor vintage, and ever since then, I have kept my eyes peeled. 

I now need somewhere to store this tableware. Large kitchen cupboards tend to go for a fortune at auction, whereas bookcases go for a pittance. The solution therefore is to buy a bookcase to use as a kitchen cupboard. A couple of weeks ago, this deceptively large bookcase came up for auction at Curr & Dewer in Dundee.

bookcase in auction catalogue

The catalogue picture was too fuzzy to know if it was genuinely Victorian or reproduction, but I could always just put a low bid on, and indeed I was delighted to bag it for just a tenner.

bookcase in Balintore drawing room

Back at the castle, a brief examination showed it is 19th Century and solid oak - hurrah!

The unit is 4'6" height and I wanted it raised off the ground so one is not scrabbling about at floor level to access the bottom shelf. The problem is that the basement room where the unit is being put is only 6'6" high so it could only be raised by 2'. Normal kitchen base units are 3' high, so something bespoke would have to be built underneath.

I suggested some beautiful Victorian billiard table legs on eBay which could be cut-down. Gregor suggested cupboards underneath instead which made more sense. We then went on the hunt for reclaimed cupboard doors in the castle. I have quite a collection. Sadly, the doors all are around 3' high.

Then it hit me. In 2020, I had bought the old pulpit from Lochee Parish Church in Dundee along with other bits-and-bobs. We had used a lot of the bits-and-bobs, but nothing from the pulpit. Perhaps some of the wonderful carved panels from the pulput could be used as doors?

carved panels from Lochee Parish Church pulpit

Sadly the panels in the photo above are too large being 3' x 3'. However, rummaging around we found two matching panels 2' (W) x 3' (H). If we turned these sideways and used some other carved details we could make the front of a base unit for the bookcase.

pulpit panels reformed into new cabinet

Above is the result at the end of day 1 (i.e. today) of building this base unit. To my eye the pulpit makes an incredibly convincing cabinet, almost like it never had a past as anything else. Gregor used cock-beaded tongue-and-groove panelling from the pulpit to make the sides of the cabinet.

rear of Gregor-faked antique cabinet

You can see from the rear of the cabinet that the framework is entirely modern, but Gregor is making it until he fakes it as an antique piece.

I now reckon the 3'x3' carved panels could make excellent (kitchen) cupboard doors on the same theme. However, Gregor loves the antique carvings so much he wants them on the wall as pictures! :-)

The moral of the story is that sometimes you have to wait a long time before using reclaimed materials. However, when that rare and right opportunity arises, the joy of recycling quality workmanship and creating something of beauty that will serve a useful purpose into the future, is deeply rewarding.

Coving Schmoving

As my eyes run over the interiors of the newly restored rooms in the basement of the castle, I am most discomforted by the lack of coving. To my eyes, a sharp 90 degree angle between the wall and the ceiling is the biggest "tell" that this is a modern interior rather than an antique one. 

The basement suffered the most water damage, so many of the rooms were back to bare stone walls and bare earth floors, so there was no coving to preserve or copy, and we have restored so far without coving. However, coving on each floor of the castle is generally the same, and there were some surviving sections in the basement, particularly in the butler's pantry, so there is little issue as to the style of what we should be puting back.

We are moving towards completion with the female servant's sitting room and as there is zero surviving coving in here, I realised that what we put back didn't have to be a exact match for anything, but just had to capture the right feel.

There is a little coving in the adjointing circular turret room so this was a good start. I do not know if there is any systematic way of descriping coving, but I would describe this as "cut, in, cut, out, in, cut". So going from the bottom to the top, you say if there is a sharp edge ("cut"), a curve that goes in ("in") or a curve that goes out ("out").

surviving coving in basement turret room - "cut, in, cut, out, in, cut"

Gregor alerted me to the fact that Screwfix does coving. I was somewhat surprised, but perhaps sourcing coving was going to be easier than I expected? It turns out Toolstation and B&Q do coving as well. Doing some internet research revealed most of this coving is manufactured in Slovakia by a Belgian company called Orac, and that this coving is actually plastic. Plastic is not an issue for me, geting close to the original coving shape is.

In the whole Orac range, only two covings were "cut, in, cut, out, in, cut" : C325 Manoir (£25.42/m)  and CB503N (£7.42/m) . Gregor reckoned the female sevants' sitting room would need a staggering 40m of coving. Identifying these 2 products took a whole evening of looking at literally hundreds of different coving shapes. It was a whole new world. It seemed like either would do, so the one that was under a third of the price of the other was the obvious candidate. However, Gregor advised getting samples before going ahead. I am so pleased I did!

C325 | Manoir

CB503N

The cheaper coving was made from something just a little better than polystyrene - I could make a mark with my thumbnail and the mouldings looked weak and did not have the same light and shade effect as the more expensive moulding where the "cut" in the centre was quite distinct. It would appear the term for this is "fragmented" coving.

Oh noes, the more expensive coving was the only one I was happy with, not only was the cut correctly in the centre but the cut showed up clearly and also I could not stick my thumbnail into this coving. I had to re-evaulate the situation.

It is the cut that makes coving look classy, and the more expensive coving showed clearer light and dark areas, and at the end of the day, that is what coving is i.e. it is to create classy patterns of light and shade. Perhaps, I should look for a plaster product and even though fewer patterns would be available off the shelf, I could locate a mould that maybe was not exact but had all the key elements of a quality Balintore cornice.

I located a plaster coving company online called The Plasterware Store, and indentified two products of theirs that channeled Balintore:  c32 | Hampshire and c15 | Gothic . The first is an almost literal channel but with a reversed ogee curve (i.e. in and out swapped in one location) ie, "cut, in, cut, in, out, cut".  The second channels the gothic quality of Balintore but is not an original design in any way. The samples that arrived through he post were a totally different animal to plastic coving. While they are a little too large, I would be happy to install either, but will go with Hampshire in the female servants sitting room.

top-to-bottom, left-to-right: Gothic, Hampshire, Manoir, CB503N

left-to-right: Gothic, Hampshire, CB503N, Manoir

So, the lesson here is to go for plaster coving not plastic. It appears to be superior on all fronts and not as expensive as the rigid plastic mouldings. It also supports the local plasterworks throughout the UK. Going for polystyrene mouldings is the cheapest option of course, but the appearance is poor in my opinion.

3⁄4" Cuban Mahogany II

Well Gregor sanded the slab of reclaimed wood that I bought recently at Steptoe's Yard in Montrose. What we both thought was weathered Cuban Mahogany turned out to be Teak. Well done to Gregor for his professional identification. Teak is even harder than Mahogany. There are Janka Hardness charts for various species of wood on the Internet.

Gregor cut this up to construct two new "meal shelves" which were once a feature of the bedroom corridors at Balintore Castle for the servants to use for holding trays.

As the reclaimed material is not the same wood type as the original mahogany, we thought it best to recreate a pair of missing shelves from scratch rather than repair existing shelves.

sanded and cut-up teak

And in fact, to get a pair of shelves out of the one slab, we had to make them 18" wide instead of the original 20". I don't think anyone is going to notice.  :-)  I sumggested cutting the shelves out across the grain instead of with the grain to get the the right size, but Gregor said they could split and we should honour the grain orientation of the original shelves.

Gregor could not locate a router bit in his case to match the original moulding of the shelve edges, and was starting to fret a little. However, he had one bit that was the right shape but just a tadge smaller in scale. I convinced him this was good enough - it certainly was to my eye. Sometimes when perfection is not achieveable, it just needs someone with a more objective outlook to say "good enough" to the person trying to solve the problem.

Gregor's router bits

The routered shelving looks great. :-) Aside from the shelf proper, there is also a section of wood that is attached to the wall, and a small section of shelf 2" deep to which the large main shelf is hinged. The depth of the main shelf was unknown as there are none left, but I remarked to Gregor that my eye and sense of proportion said they should be 12". Gregor was hovering at 10", and I suggested we could try looking at the original plans.

routered teak

Anyhow, I looked at the original plans this evening, and found this.

meal shelves described in the original plans

By a miracle, my guess at the shelf depth was spot on: 2" on one side of the hinge and 12" deep on the other making the 14" mentioned in the plans. Channel that building hurrahs! :-)

In my researches on hardwood, I learned a new word chatoyance. This is the way hardwoods change in colour with the incident angle of light, so you get a ripple effect that moves on the surface as you move your relative position. This gives a 3D effect with two vantage points i.e. one from each eye. Need I mention that chatoyance is desirable? The derivation makes one feel dumb for not spotting it. Chatoyance = chat + oeil + ance = cat + eye + ance as in the mineral cat's eye which exhibits the same phenomenon from the world of physics.  :-)

3⁄4" Cuban Mahogany

Having friends banned from visiting me at the castle, has made me realise that I need to take little trips into the world for mental health.

So on Friday, I went on a few errands. Whilst in Montrose, I made a short detour to Steptoe's Yard, which is less a reclaim yard, than a descent into Dante's Inferno. :-)

Much of the stock is unsellable or broken or decomposed, but then there is a curious masochistic pleasure and sense of adventure in trying to find something one could use - saving the planet and perhaps saving some pennies in the process.

It is an object lesson in really looking. After 30 minutes, I was in despair: the stock had aged; there had been little replenishent; and obviously the best stuff had been cherry-picked some time ago. 

Suddenly, bingo - I spotted a large cardboard box full of vintage gentlemen's hairbrushes. I had misplaced my existing vintage ones and my hair was in consequence badly in need of taming. A little rummage, and I found a pair, and indeed a pair almost identical in design to the misplaced ones. :-)

I was walking outside, in the rain, and saw an old silvered bit of wood. Much of the wood left outside at Taylors is clearly the worse for the exposure to the weather, but this looked remarkably untarnished and instinctively I tapped it. What came back was the sharp echo of hardwood! Could this possibly be Cuban Mahogany?

slab of wood from Steptoe's

I was looking for Cuban mahogany to repair the "meal shelves" at the castle i.e. flaps of wood on hinges on corridor walls outside bedrooms. You could raise these flaps to the horizonal, support them with a built-in bracket, and then use them for breakfast plates etc. The meal shelves are still largely intact at the castle, except that the flaps themselves have been taken as souvenirs. The original 1858 plans show that these were manufactured from 3/4" Cuban Mahogany.

meal shelf at castle

I had bought two small antique Cuban Mahogany tables for a tenner. However, I hadn't yet brought myself to cut these up, and was hoping against hope to find a slab of Cuban Mahogany.

Anyhow, the assistant at Steptoe's let me have the brushes and the wood for a tenner. She had been expecting me to haggle her down but I knew I had a tenner in my wallet (they only take cash) and it wasn't worth aguing the toss. She said she would give me a discount on the next visit. 

She revealed that Mr. Steptoe had had a brain stem stoke but was recovering well, apparently such a stoke is only 15% survivable. I was unaware that he was unwell and it would explain the lack of new stock.

Anyhow, before I left the yard I was delighted to see Mr. Steptoe bustling about,  perhaps not quite as busy as usual, and we exchanged a few words. I thanked him for the wood saying that it was the answer to my prayers, and he replied "That's why we do it.". :-)

The slab of wood was probably the top of a chest of drawers. Normally, these are mahogany veneer only, so this would have been a top-end piece. I measured the slab and it was 3⁄4" + 2/32" thick.

I measured the wood at the back of the meal shelves and it is 3⁄4" + 1/32" thick. The match in thickness is almost perfect. I suspect they are both nominally 3⁄4" but would have been over-spec-ed for quality and sanding purposes.

In fact, the moulding on the edges is almost identical too.

I cleaned up the back of the meal-shelf and the top half of the reclaimed slab. It's perhaps wishful thinking, but I think I can see the sample purple cast of mahogany on both. I will ask my carpenter Gregor when he comes in on Monday.

Amazingly, it looks like the back of the shelf will clean up perfectly - the grey areas are splattered plastering primer that will just need elbow grease to remove. The slab, however, will need a little re-polish with a fine grit as it feels slightly rough.

half cleaned slab of wood from Steptoe's

cleaned meal-shelf at castle

Anyhow, there is a moral buried deep in this story. You may despair with what is in front of you but look again and look more carefully and you may find the exact solutions to the problems you have.

Pallet It

I have been sourcing tiles for the large female servants' sitting room in the basement of the castle. The tiles are for a small kitchen area and a small bathroom area as would have been found there originally. Most modern tiles would look totally out of place in a Victorian setting, and indeed most modern tiles are vile, so one's choice is surprisingly limited.

When I expressed my deep frustrations to Gavin and Gregor i.e. that the only nice tiles are on eBay and "collection only" in the deep South of England, they said "Why don't you just pick-up tiles from Topps Tiles in Dundee?". 

I do listen to advice, and sat down and worked my way systematically through the Topps Tiles website. Oh dear!  Things appear to have got worse rather than better. Topps Tiles used to feature natural stone (which I favour): now there are instead a lot of porcelain fake stone tiles which enforce clinical precision on a look that used to be supplied via a natural product. Nothing in the Topps Tiles catalogue inspired, despite the fact they are a local pick-up. Obviously, not everything was horrible but the price of what could have been acceptable was extortionate.

The tile market has a very strange pricing structure. Basic white tiles, etc, are OK in price, but move away to anything remotely desirable in the design department and the price sky-rockets. I am pretty certain this does not represent the underlying manufacturing costs. I suspect pricing in tile-rich cultures like Spain and Turkey is much more democratic, but we are in rip-off Britain.

Occasionally, I am tempted to indulge in Islamic tiles (think of the Arab Hall in Leighton House in Kensington) but import costs would overwhelm, and my rational mind has decided that tiles at Balintore are functional and not a design feature in themselves. And of course even with basic tiles, tiling patterns if desired, add no additional cost.

Anyhow, it suddenly dawned on me: "Why don't I just buy those eBay tiles in the South of England, and use a pallet company?". I had used pallet companies before. It is not cheap - perhaps £100 to move a pallet around the country, but it is much less expensive than a courier or driving down in person. Of course, you have to buy enough tiles to make it worthwhile - so that £100 becomes just a fraction of the overall cost.

I had been considering at one stage plain coloured mini-metro tiles which are good value for the basic colours: white, cobalt, emerald and cobalt. These come in at £15/m². I decided that a sexy peacock mini-metro would give an Islamic feel, but these come in at £60/m². When my mini metro tile samples arrived, I did like the peacock but not enough to justify the much higher cost.

For the basement area, Gavin would not accept a white tile and wanted a warmer "ivory" colour, and indeed a warmer colour altogether for the kitchen area. He has expensive tastes. :-) 

Anyhow, I located and ordered a couple of "remaindered lots" from the South of England: one a bone-coloured crackle-glazed mini metro (for the bathroom) and the other a glaced terracotta tile with natural colour variations (for the kitchen).

Thankfully both sellers could supply their own pallet and the pick-ups and drop-offs went like a dream.  The terracotta arrived today, and the bone arrived yesterday. Thankfully, my builders approve - though they tutted at the brighter orange teracotta tiles. :-) 

The choice of colours was really constrained by the mini kitchen. We have used second hand oak doors and oak drawer fronts and broken third-hand granite worktops. With two natural textures already, the tiles simply could not be patterened, and could only be plain coloured or another very subtle natural texture. The warmth of the colour of these variagated terracotta tiles jumped out at me from the eBay listing, and I decided to just go for it. And of course, a natural terracotta product is very much what could have been used in a Victorian servant area.

I manage to find out the manufacturer of the teracotta tile (Equipe in Finueroles, Spain) and the bone tile (Adex in Onda, Spain not far away). I got some more samples of the Equipe tiles in different colours as I thought the darker teracotta, might need a lighter colour on top. Gregor and Gavin loved the Artisan Gold which is even darker, and this is after complaining they they did want too dark a tile! :-) Indeed, the Artisan Gold toned surprisingly well with the oak, but is probably too dark overall. The Atisan and Country labels turned out to be a textural variation not a colour variation - the Artisan tile is much more roughly shaped and textured.

However, while holding the teracotta tiles in place today, we all concluded they didn't need a border, or to be topped off by other tiles as they were sufficiently "stand alone". Sometimes, simplicity is the result of complex thinking. :-)

The bone tiles were left over from a client with high end tastes - these retail at over £100/m² ! It's always good to know that a bargain is even better than one thought.

I am struck by how apparently random the design decisions at Balintore are, and yet on the other hand, with the materials available things could only really have gone one way. Everything has been second hand and budget. It's particularly nice to work with Gavin and Gregor as they are putting in the hard work, so they have a vested interest in not doing anything unspeakably horrible. :-)

The terracotta tiles will go on the wall behind the bespoke kitchen units built by Gregor. So you can see the design constraints are the oak doors (eBay) and the granite countertop (Facebook Marketplace).