The terrace's front two rooms retained their original 1888 plaster cornices, ceiling roses, and picture rails — decorative plasterwork that would cost more to replicate today than most renovation budgets allow, run by a trade that's increasingly hard to find. The brief was blunt: modernize everything behind the walls without losing a millimeter of the plaster in front of them.
That constraint shaped every technical decision on the project. New electrical and data cabling was run beneath the floor rather than through the ceiling void wherever possible, and where a ceiling penetration was unavoidable, the electrician cut through in the plain plaster field between cornice runs, never through the decorative work itself.
You can rewire a house without touching its ceilings. It just takes four times longer and nobody sees the effort.
Reinstating structural capacity for a rear extension meant threading a steel portal frame through the party walls without vibration-heavy demolition near the front rooms — the contractor used diamond core drilling instead of a jackhammer for every opening within six meters of the original plasterwork, a slower and considerably more expensive method chosen specifically to protect the ceilings above.
Where cornice sections had genuinely deteriorated — mostly in the rear rooms, which had been altered decades earlier — a specialist plasterer cast new lengths from a mold taken off the intact profile elsewhere in the house, matching the original's slightly irregular hand-run proportions rather than a modern extruded equivalent.
The result reads, correctly, as an old house with entirely new services: a heat pump, full rewire, and new plumbing throughout, with not one visible sign of the work in the two rooms that mattered most to the owners.
Cornice Restoration Versus Replacement: How the Decision Gets Made
Plaster cornices in reasonable structural condition were restored in place through careful cleaning and selective in-fill repair, while sections with genuine structural failure were cast from matching profile molds taken from intact sections elsewhere in the house — a hybrid approach that preserved as much original material as possible while ensuring long-term structural soundness.
Modern Services Integration Without Visible Compromise
Running updated electrical and HVAC through a home with preserved period plasterwork required routing new services through floor voids and non-original partition walls rather than the ceiling cavities where cornices sit, a more labor-intensive approach that avoided any visible disruption to the restored decorative plasterwork.
