The Artisan Reviving Hidden Victorian Frescoes Inside Heritage Townhouses
When a young couple renovating a weathered terrace in Sydney's Paddington stripped back the layers of peeling paint in their drawing room, they expected bare brick. Instead, their sander bit into something smooth, brightly coloured, and unmistakably deliberate. A spray of roses, a garland of acanthus leaves, and the soft, cloudy sky of a long-forgotten mural emerged from beneath a century of wallpaper. The discovery sent them ringing around heritage trades until they found someone who knew exactly what to do.
That someone is Eloise Marchant, a London-trained conservator who now spends half the year in Australia reviving the painted ceilings and friezes that survive behind the lathe and plaster of Victorian terraces. Her work sits at a rarely seen intersection: fine-art restoration, building conservation, and the unglamorous craft of matching nineteenth-century pigments to modern Australian light.
Marchant's clients tend to be owners of Victorian terraces in pockets like Paddington, Balmain, and Surry Hills in Sydney, or Fitzroy, Carlton, and East Melbourne across the border. These streetscapes, classified under state heritage registers, hide more painted decoration than most locals realise. Layers of white emulsion, designer wallpaper, and 1970s paint have quietly protected cornices, ceiling roses, and full-wall tableaux for decades.
Her practice reflects a broader shift in how Australians value their period housing stock. Once dismissed as draughty and impractical, the nineteenth-century terrace is now the most covetable property type in the inner suburbs. Buyers expect original joinery, marble fireplaces, and, increasingly, the kind of hand-painted ornament that early Italian immigrants introduced to British drawing rooms a century before federation.
Unearthing the Hidden Layer
The first task on any Marchant job is rarely the painting itself. She spends a full day, sometimes two, mapping the room with a raking light, a magnifying loupe, and a gentle hand on the plaster. Cracks are read like a sentence; old repair patches hint at where previous owners ran pipes, mounted televisions, or simply forgot which room they were decorating.
She often meets clients on site in the arvo, when the light is best for reading plasterwork, and asks them to send through photos of every wall before any renovation begins. In Sydney terraces, where extensions have eaten into original rooms, it is common to find a frieze that continues around a corner and then vanishes into a modern kitchen bulkhead. Her drawings help homeowners decide whether to redesign around the mural rather than over it.
When a discovery is significant, Marchant applies for a permit through the relevant state heritage office before touching a brush. In New South Wales, the Heritage Council oversees works to listed items, while Victoria's Heritage Register carries its own set of obligations. The paperwork, she says, is worth it: a properly documented find can lift a property's value overnight.
Pigments, Plaster, and the Australian Climate
Restoring a Victorian fresco in London is one thing; doing it in Melbourne's capricious weather is another. The Hawthorn brick that absorbs humidity in July can shrink and crack the lime plaster by January. Marchant adjusts her materials to suit. She favours slaked lime putty with marble dust over modern gypsum, which breathes with the building rather than fighting it.
For colours, she grinds natural earths — Venetian red, terre verte, raw sienna — in a small Fitzroy studio. These pigments match the soft, slightly muted palette typical of late-Victorian interiors, which were designed to flatter gaslight and then, awkwardly, the early electric bulb. She avoids synthetic acrylics, which sit on the surface like a film and cannot be reversed.
| Material | Source Period | Behaviour Over Time | Suitability for Australian Climate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slaked lime putty | Pre-1900 | Carbonates, self-healing | High — manages humidity swings |
| Gypsum plaster | Post-1920 | Rigid, prone to cracking | Low — fails in coastal terraces |
| Natural earth pigments | Pre-1900 | Stable, fades gently | High — UV resistance outdoors |
| Synthetic acrylic | Post-1950 | Sits on surface, irreversible | Low — traps moisture, peels |
The table above reflects choices Marchant has refined over a decade of practice, balancing authenticity against the realities of Australian heat, salt air, and the odd tropical downpour that can test even the most carefully mixed skim coat.
The Economics of Ornament
Restoration of this calibre is not cheap. A modest ceiling rose in a Sydney terrace might cost from $2,400 to conserve, while a full-room mural can run well into five figures. Marchant is upfront about pricing, offering tiered quotes that distinguish between stabilisation, cosmetic retouching, and full scholarly reconstruction.
Her client base reads like a roll call of the new heritage-aware professional class: architects, gallerists, tech founders who have finally traded apartments for family homes. Many arrive expecting a quick touch-up and leave with a renewed respect for the craft. "It is not a paint job, it is a small archaeological dig," she tells them over a flat white in her studio, where a perpetual smell of linseed oil hangs in the air.
The market is shifting as more buyers commission pre-purchase heritage inspections. In Melbourne especially, where terraces in Carlton and Fitzroy are tightly held, an original mural can be the deciding factor at auction. Agents now flag decorative schemes on listings, and a painted frieze in sound condition can add a low-six-figure premium to a sale.
Passing the Brush
Marchant takes on two apprentices a year, both usually women in their late twenties who have left careers in graphic design or museum curation. Training runs for three years and covers plastering, gilding, colour theory, and the bureaucracy of heritage permits. She pays them above award rates and insists they learn the Australian codes as well as the British ones, no worries if they have no formal heritage background to start with.
Her longer-term ambition is to set up a permanent conservation studio in Melbourne, where demand currently outstrips capacity. A handful of independent restorers operate across the country, but there is no equivalent of the major British ateliers that train the trade globally. Australian heritage houses deserve a pipeline of skilled hands, she argues, not a revolving door of well-meaning amateurs with a tin of acrylic and good intentions.
For now, she continues to take on a handful of commissions each year, prioritising houses where the mural is structurally at risk. Readers who suspect a painted scheme behind their own walls can reach out through her studio for an initial assessment, or follow her documented restorations online to see how a forgotten ceiling becomes a room's quiet centrepiece once again.