A question of technique

Craft-makers stand equal with architects and patrons in the trinity of the country-house creator. Mary Miers meets five experts keeping our historic houses and their collections alive, repairing, conserving, reinstating and adding new layers of creativity

- Photographs by Simon Buck, Millie Pilkington and Joe Bailey

Pargetter

WE'RE among the last of the traditional pargetters,' says Bill Sargent, whose grandfather, father, uncles, brothers and cousins were all in the trade. Hailing from Essex, he cut his teeth apprenticed in London, before transferring to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk to work with his grandfather and 'two old boys', learning decorative freehand plaster-work. 'I was 21, they were in their seventies. They'd trained in the Arts-and-Crafts tradition and I was greatly influenced by that.'

Since setting up on his own in 1971, Mr Sargent has worked on every major pargetting job in East Anglia, as well as in manor houses and cottages across the country. Using only traditional materials, he does everything from restoring plaster walls and decorative modelling to new Jacobean-style overmantels and ceilings. He's proud to be keeping alive a tradition developed as a more affordable alternative to the finer gypsum plasterwork perfected by stuccadori. Modelled freehand in situ with a mix of sand, lime and ox-hair, pargetting is coarser textured, weatherproof and rustic. 'It's really a cottage industry, although it also decorated farm and manor houses,' says Mr Sargent, who looks to folk art and medieval paintings for inspiration. 'It's meant to be quite naïve; I draw the motifs on with a little trowel, model them freehand and then, after brushing out (to reduce sharpness), limewash them when dry.' The pargetter also carries out stamp-work and employs other techniques, such as sgraffito.