Plaster Over Everything? Unpacking the Trendiest Material in the Biz

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Pick up an issue of AD and it’s hard to not spot a plaster wall in its pages. Giancarlo Valle has them. So does Colin King. Jeremiah Brent and Athena Calderone are known superfans—and installed multiple examples in their joint tour-de-force home (pictured) for a client in Rhode Island, which appears in our September issue. Whether raked, sculpted into bold flutes, or smoothed into a slick frosting, plaster walls have become, as my colleague Hannah Martin puts it, a “signature of warm modernism.” “It’s almost a given in high-end and luxury homes,” says Amy Morgenstern, cofounder and creative director at Kamp Studios, the ne plus ultra of plaster artisans. Kamp cites 2015 as a turning point when “clients began moving beyond feature walls to wanting entire homes finished in plaster.”

I reached out to Morgenstern and fellow cofounder Kim Collins for a behind-the-scenes look at their process, the “tells” for shoddy plasterwork, and the inside story on a deliciously swoopy treatment they concocted for Brent and Calderone. Read on for the scoop.

—Lila Allen, Associate Director, AD PRO

Plaster Master

Lila: Tell us about that beautiful scalloped wall treatment you did for Athena and Jeremiah.

Kamp: The creation of this textured plaster finish began with an intriguing inspiration—a photo of a room in a church, where melted candles had left a striking formation of burned wax. At first, we weren’t quite sure how to interpret the direction.

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