Tuscany Wall Texturing Techniques

Bella Venetian Plaster

• It’s the wall finish that feels as authentic as it looks: Venetian plastering is bound to remind you of life in Tuscany over time. You have options if you choose this medium. Whip up a combination of marble dust, pigment and lime to make the stucco-like compound that’s applied to the walls of Italian villas or head for your paint store and pick up a Venetian plaster kit. Made from a mix of acrylic polymers and pigments, this thickly textured putty requires a trowel for application, but it doesn’t take long to get the hang of applying the dense medium. Sweep trowels full of rustic gold, peach or burnt umber plaster in random directions to create an authentic textured surface. Add glaze to seal and highlight finished walls.

Painting With Texture

• Interior house paints are a great place to start if you want to recreate the flavor of Florence, Venice and other Tuscan cities, but don’t have the money or patience to mess with the plastering process. Browse paint sections of home improvement shops for products offering textured finishes. Some replicate putty, suede and other materials, thanks to silicates and other agents added to formulations to thicken them up. If you’re on a stringent budget, you can experiment using sand to thicken latex interior paint and then apply it with a trowel after it’s sufficiently dense. Either option costs much less than commercial Venetian plasters, so if you change your mind about Italy and decide your rooms should be more Bali than Bologna, paint rather than plaster will be easier to remove without killing your drywall.

Paper Me Tuscan

• The effect is downright dazzling if you do the job right: torn wallpaper is a fun technique that delivers plenty of warmth and texture. Choose wallpaper in colors that incorporate a Tuscan palette — peaches, tans, apricots and warm terracotta. Rip up the wallpaper into pieces — no tiny half-inch square bits, please. Working in small sections at a time, apply wallpaper paste to walls and use your hands to press the torn wallpaper pieces in random patterns to the wall. Some folks prefer to use ripped brown paper in place of wallpaper and others recommend pressing tissue paper to wall sections that have been painted a Tuscany inspired color like pumpkin or camel. In all cases, apply a glaze, sealant or clear finish to the wall so colors pop and the paper stays put.

Faux Frieze

• Got frieze? The word comes from a type of wall painting with depth, those racing chariots popping out of walls surrounding historic buildings in Tuscany that fade into shallow plaster. If you can’t hire a sculptor to create a Tuscan frieze on your walls, do the next best thing: use an optically designed wallpaper that is so dimensionally vivid, all that’s missing is the tactile sensation you feel when running your hand over the surface of a wall. Dimensional wallpaper can represent everything from a bas relief frieze to an environmental graphic that transforms a wall into a vista of Lake Como. These require little effort to hang, particularly if the stock is pre-pasted. If you’re in a hurry to bring a taste of Tuscany to your walls, this can be the best and fastest way to achieve your goal, short of buying a ticket to Florence.