References
Elsbethstraße 12
There aren't many jobs in life that make your funny bone sore. While discovering the ceiling paintings at Elsbethstrasse 12, my colleague and I had sore muscles in our faces for three days from being constantly happy.
From the outside, a rather average residential building in the north of Leipzig houses an extraordinary treasure at Elsbethstrasse 12. Around 1885, the showrooms of decorative painter Richard Bachmann were probably located in an apartment on the first floor. This is the result of research by the preservation of monuments. There is a total of 50 square meters of high-quality and well-preserved oil paintings on the ceilings, spread over four rooms of a maximum size of 16 square meters each. A room in Neo-Baroque, a room in Neo-Renaissance, a room with different material imitations as well as a high quality wood imitation painting with grotesques.
The paintings were discovered by chance during a break in work. A tiny piece of painted stucco console peeked out from under tattered wallpaper in the hallway and piqued our curiosity. Over the next three days we removed the wallpaper and layers of paste with astonished eyes. The subsequent restoration took place from November 2002 to February 2003.
Friedrich-Ebert-Str. 70
Before the renovation work began, the building at Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse 70 was in a deplorable condition. The Gründerzeit corner building, erected around 1880, had serious structural defects due to decades of neglect.
Even the actually spacious staircase was not very inviting. The walls were thickly covered with wallpaper or painted over with gray latex paint, which was peeling off due to the humidity.
However, a restoration investigation revealed an attractive design and a real treasure in the entrance area. Above a wide stucco cornice was an elongated, rectangular plaster field. Exactly there an interesting grotesque painting was found and restored in the course of the renovation work.
Several layers of paint were also found in the stairwell. A decorative painting in the stairwell, which consisted of numerous lines, bands and stencil borders, was part of the initial equipment at the time of construction.
Münzgasse 18–20
The building at Münzgasse 18-22 (Schramms Hof) with its striking Italianate Neo-Renaissance façade is an above-average representative middle-class apartment building in a central location in Leipzig in the southern suburbs. The semi-detached house has two identical house entrances and a central passageway with a wrought-iron gate. A spacious vestibule on the ground floor connects to the house entrance doors.
At the time of the restoration investigation, all wall and ceiling surfaces were whitewashed. Random examinations, however, revealed indications of a once very rich design of the entire staircase using large freehand paintings. The restoration work took place from November 2003 to February 2004.
The focus of the excavation work was the upper section of the wall panels with their figurative representations. It turned out that both stairways were identical at the time of construction, and that the figurative representations were later polychrome painted over, which, however, was better preserved in one house and worse in the other due to the different building conditions. For this reason, the first painterly version with its olive-red portraits was restored in House 18/20, and the second version of the same motifs as polychrome painting in House 22. The lower wall and plinth surfaces with their lining and template work and the marble painting in the lower plinth area were reconstructed.
The ceilings show a circular view of the sky framed by fittings. It is framed by putti heads and floral-abstract ornamentation.
Kreuzstraße 1c
The building at Kreuzstrasse 1c is an above-average representative middle-class apartment building in a central location in Leipzig in the middle of the so-called printers' quarter. At the time of the restoration investigation, all wall and ceiling surfaces were whitewashed. Random examinations, however, revealed indications of a once very rich design of the entire staircase using large freehand paintings. The restoration work carried out at the request of the client as part of the general renovation took place from May to August 2005.
The paintings on the vault surfaces were completely uncovered with great effort and let celestial motifs with various types of tendrils emerge. The lunettes above the upper wall cornice were also uncovered and both were restored as they were. The wall and lower plinth surfaces with their stencil work and the marble painting in the lower plinth area were reconstructed.
The painting on the vaulted ceilings was traversed by settlement cracks, a stubborn brownish coating (probably a mixture of varnish, dirt and soot) distorted the original colors and made the overall design appear paler and more insipid than it actually was. The rearmost vaulted ceiling was particularly badly damaged, as a gas lamp had once hung here for decades, which had sooted up the painting particularly badly. So we decided to completely change the color of the sky, which was barely recognizable.
Waldstrasse 50
The building at Waldstrasse 50 is a small, villa-like apartment building in a central location in Leipzig, in the middle of the Waldstrasse district. The facade is in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The embossed base storey with plaster grooves carries an imitation clinker scratched into plaster on the first floor. The eaves cornice supported by consoles is particularly noteworthy. On the second floor there are large smooth plaster surfaces between the apartment windows, which were once designed using the sgraffito technique.
Drafts for a reconstruction were drawn up on the basis of the drawings in the construction file, the breaks taken from the facade and analogy studies. They show a boy standing on a pedestal, carrying a sign with inscriptions. He is flanked by two swans and cornucopias. Above there are wreaths with bows and tendrils.
The almost square areas between the stucco consoles on the eaves cornice and on the tower-like stairwell extension were executed in a kind of pen drawing as stucco imitation painting. The outer narrow plaster fields were without findings and were modeled on the basis of analogy drawings.
At the beginning of the renovation work, the sgraffito surfaces appeared to be extensively weathered. Only rough black-and-white surfaces were preserved from the former fine line drawing. The existing and still recognizable fragments in the upper part have been traced. after looking at the building file with its building drawings from the time of construction (see photos below), the former extent of the picturesque plaster scratches (scraffito) became apparent. Unfortunately, the drawings there were very small and sketchy. The work on the reconstruction of the Scraffito areas took place with interruptions from June to September 2006.
The aim of a restoration investigation is to uncover and document historical paint layers and designs in a building.
Because a colored version and sometimes elaborate decorative painting were standard for residential buildings a few decades ago.
In addition to a wall design from the time it was built, there are often other color versions from the following decades - the existing old wall design was usually simply whitewashed. The rule of thumb is that a house is redecorated about every 10-15 years. In the case of early Gründerzeit houses, six designed wall frames can sometimes lie on top of each other.
It is the task of a restorer to expose these, separate them from one another, assign them and document them. Due to the often poor construction conditions, this is a time-consuming and difficult-to-calculate job. As a rule, 3-5 working days on site can be assumed.
During the documentation, the exposed areas are photographed, existing patterns are traced and the color tones are recorded. Wall and ceiling structures are measured and their relationships to each other are determined.
The remuneration for such a restoration examination is based on the age of the building, the number of colors to be expected and the types of paint used.
Interior designs according to your own design
In the building at Rosslauer Straße 1, the task was to enhance the design of a very narrow, elongated entrance area with a large room height.
For this purpose, the almost four meter high wall surfaces were divided into three horizontal areas. In the lowest area, next to the stone steps, a strong embossing was painted. The central wall area above the stone steps (level ground floor) was designed with a painted balustrade against a blue sky background. On the right and left edge there is a painted column, which visually supports the ceiling. The whole thing is loosened up by climbing wine and ivy.
The blue color of the sky on the walls expands the room, the vertical and vertical division takes the height of the room.