Gilding Services Near Me: I Travel to the Job from Elwood
The surface you want gilded is usually fixed to a building, too heavy to lift, or too fragile to be worth the trip. That settles how this work runs: I come to you. I am Marcus Walkley, I have gilded for 36 years, and my gilding services run from a single studio at 143 Brighton Road, Elwood, with the work itself carried out at your address. So the question worth asking is not whether there is a gilder near your street. It is whether the person who looks at the surface is the person who lays the leaf on it. With me, those are the same pair of hands.
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Where I work across Melbourne, and one place well beyond it
Ten of the suburbs I work in sit east and south of the city: Toorak, Malvern, Kooyong, Hawthorn, Kew, Canterbury, Balwyn, Mont Albert, Glen Waverley and Brighton. What those ten have in common is simple enough: it is where the work is, and the studio sits centrally to them.
Portsea is the exception, and I would rather group it honestly than pretend it belongs beside the other ten. It sits about 90 kilometres away, at the far end of the Mornington Peninsula and on the coast. Tell me early if that is where your job is. The distance has never been the problem, but it does change how the days get set out.
Melbourne is where most of it happens, though the practice has never been confined to it. The work has taken me to Sydney and to Brisbane, and to architects and decorators in Spain, Singapore, Shanghai, Los Angeles and Aix en Provence. If your address is not on this page, ask anyway.
There is one address of my own in all of this, and it is the studio: 143 Brighton Road, Elwood, Victoria 3184. Everywhere else named here is somewhere I drive or fly to, which is how this trade has always run. A ceiling cannot be posted to a gilder, so I put the kit in the car and go to the ceiling.
What comes to the studio, and what I come to
Two kinds of job fall out of that, and knowing which one you have tells you most of what happens next.
Fixed work stays where it is, and I come to it. Ceilings and coffers, walls and feature walls, columns, lobbies, joinery, mouldings, sculpture already in position, and the ironwork at the front of a house, gates and balustrades included. All of it is gilded on site, in your room, around whatever else the building is doing that week.
Loose work can travel the other way. Mirror frames, picture frames, chairs, consoles, cabinets and smaller pieces can come to the bench at Elwood, where the light is steady and nothing else is going on around them.
The metal does not change with the direction of travel. Gold, silver and copper leaf, laid by hand onto a surface prepared for it, whether that surface is a hotel lobby or a single chair. Houses sit in the luxury homes portfolio, and hotels, venues and public rooms sit in the commercial portfolio.
Either way, it starts with me looking at the real surface. Photographs get the conversation going, and for a loose piece they often get us a long way. Anything fixed to a building I would rather stand in front of, because a gilded finish is decided by what is underneath it, and no photograph tells you that honestly.
Walkley Art, and who actually turns up
Before you let anyone put real gold onto a surface you own, it is fair to ask who is coming. Walkley Art has been my own practice for 36 years. The person who reads your first email, walks into your room and lays the leaf is one person, and that holds whatever the address turns out to be.
I teach the craft as well as work at it: gilding classes for beginners and for working artists. Standing in front of a room explaining something is a fair test of whether you actually know it.
The projects behind all of that sit on the about page.
Start with the object, not the suburb
The suburb decides how far I drive, and that is all it decides. What the thing is made of, how much of it there is, whether anyone has gilded it before, and how close a person will ever stand to it: that is what settles the job.
So lead with the object rather than the address. Tell me what it is: marcus@walkleyart.com, +61 411 622 711.
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