Decorating Penywern Road

Penywern Road was developed between 1877 and 1885 as part of the systematic build-out of the Edwardes estate holdings in the Earls Court area. The name derives from Penywern, a locality in Pembrokeshire associated with the Edwardes family, and is one of several Welsh names in the immediate vicinity, including Nevern, Trebovir, and Templeton. The road's development coincided with a period of rapid population growth in west London, driven by the extension of the District Railway and the consequent transformation of formerly agricultural land into dense terraced housing. The western portion of the road was built first, in the stuccoed Italianate manner consistent with the prevailing architectural fashion of the 1870s. As construction progressed eastward during the early 1880s, the Queen Anne Revival style had gained ascendancy, and the later houses adopt a red-brick treatment with stone and terracotta dressings. This chronological sequence is of considerable interest to architectural historians and provides conservation decorators with a built timeline of evolving materials and techniques. The street's twentieth-century history mirrors that of the wider Earls Court area: conversion to hotel and multi-occupancy use, the application of inappropriate modern coatings, and gradual deterioration of original fabric, followed by designation as part of the Earls Court Conservation Area and the implementation of informed conservation management policies.

The conservation of Penywern Road facades requires careful discrimination between the two substrate types and the application of appropriate materials for each. For the stuccoed houses, the primary concern is moisture management. Survey work should begin with a moisture mapping exercise using a calibrated capacitance meter, identifying areas where trapped moisture is causing stucco deterioration. All impervious modern coatings must be removed, typically using a proprietary alkaline paint remover applied under a paper tissue poultice and scraped off after an appropriate dwell time of four to eight hours. Areas of defective stucco should be cut out to clean, sound substrate and rebuilt using a gauged lime mortar matched to the original, with repairs allowed to cure under damp hessian for a minimum of seven days to ensure proper carbonation. The finish coat should be a potassium silicate mineral paint providing a vapour-permeable, chemically bonded finish with a service life of twenty to thirty years. For the red-brick houses, any inappropriate paint coatings on brickwork must be removed using a non-acidic poultice stripper system, as acid-based removers will attack the lime mortar joints and potentially stain the brick. Repointing should employ a hot-mixed lime mortar of NHL 2 or NHL 3.5 hydraulicity, depending on exposure, with the aggregate selected to match the original in colour and grading. Portland stone dressings should be cleaned using controlled nebulous water spray and any necessary repairs executed in a lime-stone dust mortar. Timber joinery throughout the road requires stripping to bare wood, treatment of any decay with a boron-based preservative, consolidation of softened grain with an epoxy resin consolidant, and repainting with a traditional three-coat linseed oil and alkyd system. Cast iron rainwater goods should be prepared by wire-brushing and primed with a calcium plumbate primer before finishing in black gloss.