Paint manufactured in Yorkshire to help £20m Natural History Museum restoration project

The architecture firm was awarded the contract to manage the latest phase of works to repair the façade of the Natural History Museum’s 19th century, grade two-listed Waterhouse Building.

The structure is one of the country’s most striking examples of Victorian Romanesque revival architecture and the first building in England entirely faced with terracotta.

The building, which was opened in 1881, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse. The exterior of the building was aggressively cleaned in the 1980s leading to accelerated damage to the highly decorative facade.

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Avanti was chosen for a research project to ‘define the repair and restoration’ of the Grade I-listed building’s façade in 2015.

Over the past decade, a restoration project has been carried out in five distinct phases.

Brouns & Co’s chief executive Michiel Brouns is a conservation expert who gained expertise in restoring and renovating historic buildings in his native Netherlands before moving to the UK in 2006 and setting up Brouns & Co in Yorkshire.

“In Scandinavia, which has a long tradition of using linseed paint, original coats of linseed paint have survived on houses that are more than 500 years old,” he said.

“Linseed oil paint is fully protective against the weather; unlike modern plastic-based paints, its wicking properties enable humidity to evaporate, instead of trapping moisture under an impermeable film, and it’s absolutely historically accurate to the period of this iconic building,”

He added: “We are really excited to work on this important project to restore the Waterhouse Building with Avanti and the other conservation experts who are leading the field in this vital area of work.”

Fiona Lamb, Avanti Architects director, said: “As specialists in the conservation and heritage sector, we work hard to ensure we specify the correct materials in the repair and care of historic buildings.

"Paint is so often key to protecting and extending the life of materials like timber and metal; using the wrong paint can be disastrous for the building and the environment.

“Whereas modern paints are made from plastics, which are tinted with synthetic pigments and filled with drying agents, Brouns & Co’s linseed paint, which we are using on the original cast iron windows that were installed when the museum was built in 1881, is made in the traditional way by grinding powder pigments into boiled linseed oil.

“The modern formulation has zinc oxide rather than lead as the mould inhibitor and with the right combination of zinc white and titanium dioxide, the paint has great efficacy and produces a paint that is safe for the environment, great to work with and enhances the protection of wood and metal.”

Brouns & Co works with architecture practices worldwide and the firm’s client list includes Chatsworth House, the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate and Channel 4’s Grand Designs team.

Brouns & Co is also winning new orders for its unique natural paints from the US, where, in regions such as New England and the wider East Coast, linseed paint is helping to solve the major conservation issue of maintaining historic wooden buildings.