Once upon a time, a façade wasn't just a pretty face - it was a breathing skin, a working shield against the elements.
Walk through Luxembourg's older quarters: Pfaffenthal, Grund, or the winding streets of Clausen, and you'll see the evidence of centuries of façade evolution. Some buildings still wear their original limewash, softly aging like weathered cheeks. Others have been "updated" with materials that seem determined to suffocate them from the outside in. The difference isn't just visual, it's almost philosophical.
In the old days, your choices were fairly simple:
Limewash: Easy to apply, beautifully breathable, endlessly re-coatable - if you didn't mind refreshing it every few years. The finish has a subtle depth to it, almost like velvet, catching light differently throughout the day, revealing the hand of its application in gentle brush strokes and variations.
Silicate paints: Introduced in the 19th century, a small revolution. Mineral-based, bonded into the surface itself, extraordinarily durable, and still breathable. They have a particular luminosity, a way of letting the wall beneath still speak while adding their own matte character.
Fast forward to the 20th century, and along comes dispersion paint, synthetic, affordable, easy to apply, promising bright colours that would last forever. Dispersion paints were, and still are, a popular choice for new builds with damp-proof courses, but on historic walls built to breathe, they can trap moisture inside the fabric. The result? Flaking, blistering, hidden decay.
More recently, painters and handymen have embraced silicone-based paints. One coat, water rolls off like pearls, minimal maintenance. Perfect, if you want a façade that behaves like a raincoat. Less perfect, if you value the slow, natural exchange of moisture that keeps old walls alive.
Silicone paints are the fast food of façade treatments: quick, shiny, satisfying in the short term, but not necessarily a recipe for long-term health. A lime-washed wall ages like a face with character; a silicone-coated one is more like bad plastic surgery, initially smooth but increasingly odd-looking as the years pass, with that particular tightness that doesn't fool anyone.
It's no coincidence that our buildings now wear the same quick-fix, maintenance-free surfaces that we've embraced in so many other areas of life. We want our coffees instant, our furniture assembled in minutes, and our façades to be set-and-forget. The idea of seasonal care, of renewing a limewash every few years as part of a building's natural lifecycle? It feels almost quaint in our update-obsessed culture.
A Small Revolution: Historical Colours and Breathable Materials
Luckily, not everyone bought into the "plastic skin" dream.
Companies like Little Greene and Farrow & Ball quietly started reviving historical colour palettes - not just pretty period hues, but colours based on meticulous archival research. Little Greene, in particular, partnered with English Heritage to unearth tones from Georgian, Regency, Victorian and Twentieth Century eras, bringing back the soft whites, muted blues, and grounded earth tones that buildings once wore so naturally.
For our own façade project, we leaned into this philosophy.
We chose a proper mineral-based system: Keim silicate paints. Breathable, durable, and ageing gracefully without peeling or suffocating the walls beneath. For colour, we found inspiration in the historical tones: a calm, balanced tone from Little Greene (Loft White) and a soft, delicate Arctic blue from Caparol.
Choosing the right blue was, let's say, a process:
I spent weeks outside with eight 1x1 metre colour sample boards, studying how the tones shifted in morning mist, harsh midday sun, and golden evening light. It wasn't a decision made lightly, not when you see, daily, how many beautiful façades are ruined by one poorly chosen paint swatch.
At one point it became something of a local event. Neighbours had opinions. Passers-by offered commentary. Even the postman weighed in. My favourite was the elderly gentleman who stopped every day for a week, hands clasped behind his back, to deliver his verdict with Luxembourgish directness: “Gëschter war besser. Dëst hei gesäit aus wéi wann et an d’Musel gefall wier" (Yesterday's blue was better. This one looks like someone dropped it in the Moselle.). Hard to argue with that assessment, really.
In the end, we chose the Caparol Arctic blue, not for technical reasons, but because it was the right colour for the house, in the right light, with the right soul. (And sometimes, after all the research and theory, you simply trust your eyes.)
What's the Façade Really Wearing?
Choosing paint for a historic building isn't just about colour. It's about authenticity.
Do you want a façade that breathes, shifts, ages like a living thing? Or a façade that seals itself off behind a bright, brittle surface, pretending to be something it's not?
Next time you walk down an old street in Luxembourg or anywhere with buildings that have witnessed more than a single generation, look a little closer.
Some façades wear their years lightly. Some wear them badly. And some are just trying, a little too hard, to look young forever.
They're not so different from us, really.
(Stay tuned for the full story of our façade project — the battles, the surprises, and the quiet satisfaction of getting it right.)
written by Helen M. Krauss