Stuck on stucco

Whenever the words ‘stucco house’ appear in the newspapers, you can be certain the occupiers have been up to no good. The Russian kleptocrat in his stucco palace in Mayfair. The shamefaced prime minister seeking refuge in the stucco mansion of a party-donor chum. The disgraced wife-throttler with a stucco terrace in Eaton Square. In each case, it is miscreant stucco, offshore-trust stucco, stucco hiding corruption and foul play behind whiter-than-white, butter-wouldn’t-melt façades.

Almost from the moment the first stucco suburbs — Belgravia, Pimlico, Bayswater, Paddington, Notting Hill, North Kensington — went up in the 19th century, modelled more or less devotedly on John Nash’s Regent’s Park scheme, ‘Stuccovia’, as it was called, was treated with suspicion and sometimes derision. Those runs of piano-key houses were too smooth, too bourgeois, too bland, too samey, too suburban. This, when any street west of Marble Arch was thought to be the outer reaches of civilised London. ‘People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,’ said the satirist G.W.E Russell of small-minded, ‘excruciatingly genteel’ Stuccovia in 1902.

There are two sorts of stucco (which is a type of plaster). The first is the delicate, filigree stucco work of Italian stuccatori craftsmen: lace-like wedding-veil patterns applied to ceilings and drawing-room panels and popularised in this country by Robert Adam. Adam was the master of intricate stucco-work ceilings, not always white, but often coloured in his palette of pinks and blues. Horace Walpole mocked Adam’s stucco daintiness as ‘gingerbread and sippets’, but clients adored it.

Less so Adam’s external stucco work. Frances Sands, curator of a superb new exhibition, Robert Adam’s London, at Sir John Soane’s Museum, cites Kenwood House where Lord Mansfield complained that far from being a cheap alternative to stone, the stucco needed so much upkeep and redoing that ‘it would have been cheaper to cover it all in Parian marble’.