History of Safra Venetian Plasters

In 1977, the company was taken over by Annibale's son, Luigi and his brother, Gianfranco, both of whom were chemists. Gianfranco began to focus on the research and development aspect of the company, while Luigi took over the marketing and commercial parts. The outcome of such new management led Our plaster to a rapid growth.

Today they are the mother company of a group which includes branch companies like Our plaster SCHWEITZ, Our plaster DEUTSCHLAND, Our plaster CROAZIA, Our plaster EAST and Our plaster HOLDING, together with varying degrees of participation in a number of other leading European manufacturers of decorative finishes.

Our manufacturer was a pioneer in the investigation of the lime-based finishes traditional of the Italian decorative heritage and in 1980 they begun proposing to the market the rediscovery of the unique decorative effects achievable with such family of finishes. The Italian market accepted most positively such rediscovery and many more paint manufacturers followed suit.

Since then Gianfranco and his team of researchers concentrated their efforts on investigating and improving the tinting pastes technology and performance, together with masterminding a consistent number of decorative effects, mineral and water-based. Today Our plasterhas a huge portfolio of formulations, more than 70 different ones of Venetian Plaster alone, covering a wide range of different looks, textures and technical performances.

The decorative finishes which, in Our plaster's opinion, outperform the present market standards in some major feature have been gathered in specific line of high-decorative effects called ARTENOVA.

Their most advanced tinting pastes were collected in the ARTECOLOR tinting system. Stringent quality checks of all incoming raw materials, of the various semifinished solutions and of any and all batches of finished products are obviously performed. Our plaster's commitment to Total Quality is evident to anyone visiting their premises, where part of the machinery was developed specifically following Our plaster's design and project suggestions.

All our manufacturers dispersors work in vacuum conditions, to reduce as much as possible the phenomena of air micro-bubbles inside the products. Such phenomena can lead to bacteria pollution in time and requires the use of a number of chemicals to solve, which additives in turn may lead to batch-to-batch performance inconsistencies, having often to be added in quantities directly related to the amount of air inside the specific batch. Our plaster uses only steel tanks and pipery. No fiberglass or other second best.

When you hire us, you are buying family traditions handed down from generation to generation. No other company in the world is more committed to producing true authentic Italian Plasters that will last a lifetime.

Venetian Plaster (VP) isn’t only a decorative finish with unique aesthetic and tactile performances. It is the result of the research of generations of Venetian decorators to answer the challenge put before them by the city of Venice.

Since the times of Ancient Greece and before, the preferred building material for monuments and nobles’ houses was marble. Wherever such material wasn’t used, for economical or architectonical reasons both, the alternatives consisted of distempers, frescoes or encaustos. In Venice it was impossible to use marble, being it too heavy for a city built on wood-poles. All heavy building-materials (as the stones used as basements for palaces) were used only as far as they were functional to bearing the structure of the building. The remaining vertical surfaces were mainly built with bricks and lime plaster. Ceilings and roofs were made with wood beams and roof tiles. The lighter the building, the less expensive.

The second challenge for venetian decorators and architects was posed by the salt in the water around the houses and in the air every time the sea was rough. Those two factors, emphasized by the frequent fogs, quickly degraded the frescoes and the distempers normally used within the city.

The third problem consisted of the ascending humidity in the walls. The salts penetrating the walls made the plasters burst every few years.

Many years of trial-on-error experiences made it possible to find the solution to make plaster and finishes last much longer. The decorators’ and architects’ goal was to find a finish as similar as possible to marble. Such finish though had (1) to be as resistant as marble but much lighter (2) to be as shiny as marble, preserving the shine in time and (3) to withstand humidity and salts.

Thus Stucco Veneziano was conceived, son of many fathers who loved Venice as much as their job, master decorators who -through the continuous rielaboration of ancient building techniques- managed to reach the excellent solution that we know as Stucco Veneziano.

The exterior plastering of those times always begun with the assembly and application of a lime plaster obtained through the blending of sand, ground stones, ground bricks (cocciopesto) and hydraulic lime.
The cocciopesto donated a good hydraulicity to the plaster and made it weightless.

The following layers of plaster were composed of cocciopesto and aereal lime. Such preparation of the basecoat made it possible for the wall to let the ascending humidity go efficiently out. The short-end was that the wall would also absorb with extreme ease the humidity coming from outside the wall.

In light of the above the cycle had to be completed with a product which would reduce the porosity of the substrate to the desired degree: water-drops had to be stopped but water-vapour had to pass freely. Resistance to salts was equally critical.

Stucco Veneziano was the reply to all those instances. Originally it was formulated as a blend of aereal lime, marble-dust and linseed oil, blended when hot. The lime, through carbonation, in time would become as hard as a stone and the oil –giving hydro repellence- prevented the salts from damaging the façade.

In its thousands of variations, Stucco Veneziano was manufactured almost in the same way through centuries. Today, with the discovery of hydro-soluble acrylic resins, suitable also to very humid environments, it is possible to reproduce Stucco Venezianos with performances close or very close to the original formulation, looking to the future and coping successfully with the new materials and today’s requirements in term of building techniques and pollution resistance.