Residential Gilding Services for Private Homes
What goes onto the wall in a gilded room is real metal: gold, silver or copper leaf, beaten thin and laid down by hand, one sheet at a time. It is not paint. I am Marcus Walkley, and I have gilded for 36 years. My residential gilding services cover walls, doors, joinery, mirror frames and furniture, in private homes across Melbourne and beyond. I work out of a studio at 143 Brighton Road, Elwood, and I travel to the house. Dr Sandra Short asked me into her 100-year-old home in Double Bay, Sydney, and that is a fair picture of how this begins: one owner, one room, and one surface that has never been right.
Our Services
Where gilding goes in a private home
Gilding sits among the decorative wall finishes, and what it leaves behind is metal, not pigment.
In a house, the work concentrates in a handful of places:
Feature wall finishes, where a whole plane is gilded and the room changes character with the light through the day.
Doors, architraves, mouldings and joinery, gilded in part, so the metal reads as a line and not a block.
Mantels, niches, alcoves and the backs of shelves, where a small area of gold does more work than a large one.
Mirror frames, picture frames and furniture: consoles, chairs, bedheads, cabinets. The furniture portfolio is the closest thing to a catalogue I keep.
Sculpture, mosaic and one-off pieces made for a single spot in the house.
A ceiling can be gilded as well, though that is a different kind of job.
Gold, silver and copper each throw a different light into a room. Gold warms whatever is near it. Silver runs cool and reads almost architectural against dark joinery. Copper sits between them. Which one belongs in your house gets decided against your own walls and lighting, never from a swatch.
Having the work done while you are living there
This is the question I am asked first inside a house, and it is the right one to ask. Gilding is not a workshop job you can send away and collect. The leaf goes onto the wall where the wall already is, so the work happens around your furniture and inside your week.
I am not going to invent a procedure for a web page. What I can tell you is smaller and true. Polite and punctual are the words I have always used about my own work. I oversee every job personally. And a good number of the people who have had me in once have had me back.
> "I knew Marcus was the right person to restore my 100 year old home in Double Bay the minute he walked in"
> Dr Sandra Short, Owner, DentArtistry
That call gets made at the front door, before anybody has said a word about leaf or budget. There are more of them on my testimonials page.
How long a room is out of use is a scope question, and any figure I put here would be a guess. It turns on the surface, its condition, how much of it is being gilded, and whether other trades are still working around you. You get that answer at the consultation, measured against your actual room.
If a decorator or an architect is already involved
Then the scheme is theirs, and I work inside it. You will not have to referee an argument about taste, because I am not there to have one. A great deal of my work in luxury home interiors reaches me this way, and it suits everybody.
What it changes for you is who I talk to. Your decorator and I settle the metal, the tone, and how much of the surface carries it, and you see the result rather than sitting through the conversation. If you would rather be in it, say so.
Nothing here comes off a shelf. Custom interior finishes are made for the one room they go into, because the tone that works under your lighting will not work under somebody else's. Where an owner wants bespoke home finishes across several rooms, that is designed as one decision rather than four.
You do not need a decorator to call me. I am equally happy dealing with the owner directly.
Walkley Art: who does the work in your home
Walkley Art is one practice with one name on it, and that name is mine. One craft, done for 36 years, is why I can stand in a room and tell you quickly whether an idea will work on that surface.
I came to gilding as an artist. A Diploma of Fine Art at Prahran Technical College, postgraduate study in Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, then specialist training with Jennifer Bennell at the Studio of Painted Finishes in Sydney, and membership of the Society of Gilders.
The work gets written about as well as photographed. Australian Design Review ran a feature by Sophie Berrill in March 2026, and pieces have appeared in InStyle and in Villa & Yacht. Guarantees and warranties cover both materials and workmanship.
Rooms are easier to judge than credentials. Have a look through the luxury homes portfolio, and the longer version of how gold got into my life is on the about page.
Where I work from, and how far I travel
The studio is at 143 Brighton Road, Elwood, Victoria 3184. It is where I am based and where bench work happens. Everything else I do, I do at your address.
Melbourne is the home ground, and most residential interiors I work on sit inside it: Toorak, Brighton, Hawthorn, Malvern, Kew, Canterbury, Balwyn, Mont Albert, Glen Waverley and Portsea. Beyond Melbourne I work across Australia, Sydney and Brisbane included, and I have gilded for architects and decorators overseas. Double Bay is in Sydney, and I went.
If your house is outside Melbourne, say so in your first message; distance changes how a job gets organised.
The part nobody describes to you is the ordinary part that comes afterwards. The room back in use. The furniture where it belongs. You walking past that surface four or five times a day without thinking about it.
A gilded wall is not one colour. It is one thing at eight in the morning with the curtains open, another at four in the afternoon, something else again under a lamp at night. Paint settles into the background within a fortnight. Leaf never quite settles, because the light keeps moving and the metal keeps answering it.
So describe the room to me. Which way it faces, what time of day you are genuinely in it, what is already there in brass or timber or stone, and which surface is the one that has been bothering you.
My email is marcus@walkleyart.com and my number is +61 411 622 711. I answer both myself, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.
The room after I have gone
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