If you’ve visited our blog before the name Titian Studios might sound familiar to you, from one of our past blog posts, highlighting the versatile skill set of this talented company who specialise in gilding, lacquer work, painted decoration, antique furniture restoration, Verre eglomise, and conservation. Established in 1963, this family business has built up a wealth of experience and talent, and when it comes to unique or large projects they literally never say never! Rod, Rosaria, and their team, are long-time clients and friends of ours here at GLS, we’ve supplied leaf for many of their memorable projects including: the Interior gilding of the Dorchester and Sheraton Hotels in central London, the iconic Royal Albert Memorial and a very unusual request for the fashion Industry where they were asked to gild some shoes and garments for a prestigious London fashion show. A very challenging task but also very beautiful, as you can see below.
Gilding for a prestigious London fashion show
Guilding the Guru Nanak Gurdwara
Titan Studios were the gilders in charge of creating the remarkable Gold Leaf finish on the domes of this beautiful Gurdwara – which can be seen for miles!
But for this post we want to shine a light on a show stopping project they completed over the past year or so, on either side of the pandemic which was challenging due to the vast scale and also the issues with continual lock downs. As usual they more than rose to the challenge. This incredible building, the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Smethwick, in the West Midlands, is one of the oldest Gudwaras (a place where Sikhs come together for congregational worship) in the UK and has recently undergone some extensive restoration.
The domes were delivered to their studio in West London and some of them were enormous – they had to use a crane to get them back into their original place! It’s a good thing they have a large studio space as they soon filled their space with the many domes and mouldings that were in need of their Midas touch.
A completed Gold Gilded dome
To create a mirror finish on the leaf, similar to the finish created by water gilding, before they started gilding the team used the popular Kolner Instacoll high gloss Gold size in yellow, to prep the domes and parts of other decorative mouldings for the restoration.
This quality size can be used both indoors and out. It stands up well to the test of time and has been used on many prestigious buildings all over the world. Once the size was applied, it was time to lay the leaf and with over 1000 books of our 23.5ct Loose Gold leaf to expertly lay, the team was very busy!
The Titan Studios team never shy away from a large project, they were previously involved in the re-gild of the Royal Albert Memorial in London (shown below) this time the leaf was applied on site, you can see Rod here on top of the scaffolding – a gilder also needs a good head for heights sometimes!
We never have any hesitation in recommending the Titian Studio team for projects, over the years we’ve presented them with some challenging requests from clients and they have always delivered projects with the highest level of expertise and professionalism.
We’re always excited to find out what the next project will be…If you are interested in seeing more of Titian Studio’s work, you can follow them on their Instagram or check out their website. You can learn more about using Kolner Instacoll in the video below.