The Spark
A Hotel Room
That Asked a Question
It began with a hotel stay. The walls were plastered — standard multi-finish, bare and unpainted — and yet the room still looked considered. The furnishings did their job. But something nagged at me. The plaster was that familiar pale pink, and it seemed like a shame. Why did it have to stay that colour? Why couldn't it simply be something else?
That one question — sitting in a hotel room, looking at a wall — became the seed of everything that followed.
The Idea
The Same Job.
Just Coloured.
What struck me was how straightforward it could be. Plasterers are already on site, already mixing, already applying. If the colour was built into the plaster itself — not painted on afterwards — they could offer clients something completely new without changing a single part of their process.
And once you have colour, you can start thinking about texture. About finish. About sealants. Suddenly a simple trade product becomes a complete decorative system — one that any competent plasterer could deliver and any client would love.
The Research
Weeks of Testing.
Mixing. Trying. Refining.
I threw myself into research. Fine art pigments. Mineral oxides. Additive ratios. I spent weeks mixing colours into gypsum plaster, testing how they set, how they dried, how they looked in different lights and at different thicknesses. Some didn't work at all. Some were extraordinary.
Coming from a property development background, I already understood the design process — how homes are built, how spaces are conceived, how materials interact. That hands-on knowledge helped me test properly, think practically, and push past the early failures toward something that genuinely worked.
The Proof
Real Walls.
Real Results.
Once the colours were dialled in, I needed to see them in the real world. I got friends to test them on actual walls — proper plastered surfaces in real homes. The results were undeniable. The warmth, the depth, the way the colour lived within the plaster rather than sitting on top of it. It looked like nothing else on the market.
That was the moment Tone Coat stopped being an idea and became a product.
Now
Made in Norfolk.
Built to Last.
Tone Coat is hand-tinted by us in Norfolk, UK. Every bag is individually mixed and batch-coded so you can reorder exact tones with confidence. The palette now spans 22 colours — from the palest chalk whites to deep earthy darks — with more on the way.
We're still the same product at heart: a pigment you add to a bag of British Gypsum Multi-Finish plaster. Simple to use, remarkable in result. And we're just getting started.