"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
This question came from my husband, about half an hour after I'd begun to slather a milkshakelike blue mud onto the wall of the extra bedroom.
"Sort of," I replied, as a gob of mud slid off my trowel and hit the newspaper at my feet with a splat. It was my first experience with wall plaster, and not being a natural do-it-yourselfer, my technique was 90 percent ad-lib, 10 percent instruction sheet.
As opposed to painting a wall, plastering is more an art form. In this case, the medium was a natural, nontoxic material called Original Earth Plaster made by American Clay. It hopes to be everything in a wall finish that you've been waiting for: beautiful, easy and, it just so happens, healthy and sustainable.
Its creators are betting it will be one of the first green products to hit it big in the DIY mainstream marketplace.
American Clay was founded three years ago by Santa Fean Carol Baumgartel and her son, Croft Elsaesser. Baumgartel, a ceramicist and interior decorator, had built her own houses with adobe interiors and Structalite, a gypsum-based plaster. But the former was dusty and the latter ``didn't breathe and was hard to color," she says.
At the same time Baumgartel was looking for an alternative, her son was working in the high-end finishing business in Phoenix. He, too, was searching for a less expensive, less coarse, harder version of the European clay-based plasters that were popular among wealthy homeowners.
"Together we kind of thought, 'Well, maybe we can make our own,' " Baumgartel says.
They went to a clay store and bought, she recalls, "about 50 bags of different stuff."
During 1999, Elsaesser turned his garage into a chemistry lab, mixing and measuring clays, sands, aggregates and pigments. He consulted geologists about the properties of the materials. His mother flew to Arizona regularly to test the latest batch. When they believed they had a winning recipe, they tried it on the walls of Baumgartel's new house.
It worked.
"They probably put up 6,000 square feet of the product in my house and I, to this day, am so sorry that I didn't have them do every inch."
Plaster has an earthier personality than paint. It hugs the wall instead of suffocating it. It breathes, soaking up excess humidity and releasing it when the air is too dry. Its texture can range from gritty to smooth to undulating, depending on whether it's finished with a trowel, a sponge or fingers. And thanks to American Clay and at least one competitor, Med Imports' Terramed, the color palette continues to grow, from terra cottas and tans to yellows, greens and blues.
Clay plaster "is warmer, it is quieter, it feels healthier," Baumgartel says. "It's beautiful, visually."
``Sit in a room with clay plaster walls," she continues, ``and you will notice the difference and you'll have a hard time describing it."
The biggest change accompanying these new plasters is that it doesn't take a professional to apply them. Both American Clay and Med Imports deliver their products in powder form. To prepare the plasters, all you do is add water, mix and trowel onto the wall. Already painted surfaces require a primer (American Clay sells one of its own; Terramed recommends adding play sand to tinted primer), and some walls will need sealer.
I ordered samples of both the Terramed and the American Clay, both of which were simple to prepare and, shall we say, fun to experiment with.
With no odor or harmful toxins to worry about, I was even comfortable letting my 3-year-old in on the project.
And despite the fact that I had no experience whatsoever, the experimental patches on the wall came out good enough to convince my husband that we should plaster, instead of repaint, the walls in our dining area.
In 2004, American Clay won the Outstanding Green Product Award from the National Association of Home Builders. With plans to grab the wall-finishes market -- both commercial and residential -- by the horns, Baumgartel and Elsaesser hired Paul Avidon, a former Formica North America executive who lives in Keller, and made him the company's CEO and president.
In a January interview, Avidon said the company's strategy would be to market the product's aesthetic quality, affordability and ease of use, as well as its green qualities. "It's an easy sell, once people see it," he said.
Avidon recently left the company, but Jyl DeHaven, a local green-building consultant who has worked with American Clay, downplays his departure.
The company, she says, "is still growing like gangbusters ... You've got to be able to survive, whether one person stays or goes."
The company offers two distinct finishes, the original Loma and a "super-smooth" Venetian-looking Porcelina. The Loma runs $49 for a 50-pound bag, plus $10 to $43 for the pigment. Porcelina costs $73 a bag, plus pigment.
The company has several dozen distributors across the Western United States (none in Texas so far) and takes phone orders at (866) 404-1634. Depending on the wall surface, one 50-pound bag of Loma will cover 80 square feet to 120 square feet in two coats. Porcelina covers almost twice that area, after a base coat of Loma.
For more information about American Clay, go to www.americanclay.com. To find out what Terramed has to offer, see www.medimports.net.
By Liz Stevens
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
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