Dean hand-paints decorative finishes in Upton, the design-code neighbourhood about 2.1 miles west of Northampton town centre. The double-height living spaces, mezzanines and cathedral ceilings in Upton's villas give more room for feature walls and effects than a standard estate house.
Tall rooms with nothing to pick out
Older Northampton houses come with cornices, dado rails and ceiling roses that a decorative scheme can be built around. Upton’s homes, built from 2005 onwards, mostly do not. What the design-code villas have instead is volume: double-height sun spaces, cathedral ceilings under 45-degree roofs and mezzanines looking down into the living space. In a room like that, a single flat colour on a double-height wall can look bare. A decorative finish gives the eye something to land on.
The finishes that suit these rooms are usually bold in scale and simple in detail:
- Colour blocking: a deep colour taken up to the mezzanine line, or a band that follows the slope of a cathedral ceiling.
- Two-tone splits: a darker lower wall with a crisp line, which also takes knocks better in a busy open-plan room.
- Limewash-effect or textured paint: soft movement in the colour that reads well from across a large room.
- Painted panelling: new MDF panelling added to a hall or bedroom wall and painted so the joints disappear.
Working at height on an effect
A flat colour can be cut in from a ladder in stages. A layered effect cannot. Glazes and broken-colour finishes need to be worked while wet across the whole wall, with no stop lines between sections. On a double-height wall that means an internal tower set up before we start, and the wall is worked top to bottom in one continuous session so the wet edge never dries. We plan the order of the wall, the joints in the scaffold and the breaks in the effect before any paint is opened.
Three-storey townhouses offer a different kind of tall wall: the stairwell. A colour-blocked band that rises with the stairs, or a darker lower section that stops at a clean line above the handrail, works well there and hides the scuffs that bags and bikes leave on the way up. Because the tower or staging stays in the stairwell for the length of the job, we agree beforehand how you will get between floors while it is up, and a layered effect is planned so it can be finished in one visit rather than left half-done overnight.
Large glazing shows everything
Site C on West Street was designed with glazed double-height gables and large areas of glass, turned towards the sun. That light is good for showing off a finish, but it shows faults too. Metallic paints and glazes look different from every angle in raking light, and a lap mark that would be invisible in a dim hall becomes obvious. We make a sample board first and look at it in the room at different times of day. Where glare is strong we usually steer towards matt textures rather than shiny metallics.
Taking colours from the building itself
The design code drew on local stone and clay, and the award-winning phases mix brick, stone, timber and grey zinc cladding. A decorative scheme indoors can pick up those materials: warm earth tones that echo brick, a soft stone colour on a textured wall, or a cool grey that links to the zinc seen through the window. Upton also borders Ashby Wood and the country park, and greens in a limewash effect can bring that outlook inside.
Underneath, Upton’s 10 to 20-year-old plasterboard usually needs its settlement cracks at joints filled and the thin contract emulsion sealed, or a glaze will grab unevenly over it. The decorative finishes service page describes each type of effect in more detail, and the interior painting page covers the base work. For the other trades we cover locally, see the Upton area page.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
