Banding & Blockwork

Two ways to break up a wall

Banding and blockwork both divide a plain surface into parts, but they do it for different reasons and they look nothing like each other.

Banding

Banding layers one finish over another in defined bands — matching textures or deliberately contrasting ones, Lucidato against Intona, smooth against textured, running horizontally or vertically. On a large wall it gives the eye something to measure against, and it can make a room read as larger than it is. It is also the straightforward way to pick out an architectural feature, frame an area, or suggest panelling on a wall that has none.

Blockwork

Blockwork does something else entirely: it gives the look and feel of real weathered stone without the weight or the thickness of the real thing. Texture and tone are varied from block to block, the way they vary in a genuine stone wall, so the surface never repeats. It earns its place where stone would be right but the wall will not carry it, or where there is no depth to give away — a shower area, for instance, as at The Old Vicarage in Douglas.

Where it has gone

The kitchen and the pool area at The Arches, the bar at The Northern in Ramsey, and a Marmorino blockwork bathroom.