Earthen plaster, slow rooms.

A wall has a lifetime.

The Berber masters in the Atlas finish a wall in seven passes over fourteen days. The first pass is rougher than the seventh by an order of magnitude. The seventh is burnished with a river stone until it returns light like skin. I watched a man do this for an afternoon and understood, finally, that a wall has a lifetime, and that we have been killing walls at birth with one-coat industrial plasters that cure in four hours and crack in four years.

Speed is the enemy of patina. Patina is the only finish that improves with use.

The Nairobi problem.

We brought the technique back. Nairobi humidity is not the Atlas. The first wall we tried bloomed with mould in three weeks. The second, with a lime stabiliser at 8%, held. The third, at 12%, held and burnished. We have a recipe now. It is not the Berber recipe. It is a Berber recipe translated, and the translation took eighteen months and three failed rooms.

What it costs, what it returns.

Earthen plaster, done properly, runs at roughly 2.4x the cost of acrylic. It is also the only finish in any of our buildings that has never required a maintenance call. Over a ten-year hold, it is the cheapest wall we install. Over a fifty-year hold, it is the only wall that will still be there.

Field note, Karen workshop, October.

A note for the school.

I keep these notes because the act of writing them slows me down enough to notice what I am doing. The portfolio is the by-product. The practice is the point.