Villa Nordstern

Cement manufacturer Hermann Manske had Villa Nordstern built as his residence in the Lower Saxon town of Lehrte in 1892. The building has a complex history, served mainly as a children's home for about 80 years, stood empty for two decades and was almost demolished until Rolf Neumann acquired the villa to repair it. The listed building was in a desolate condition, even the masonry and stucco profiles were damaged by moisture. One of the tasks was to conserve the complete stucco and plaster façade of the villa, to restore it and to replace what had been lost. Today, the building houses a day-care centre for children and was chosen as the 'most beautiful house in the Hanover region' in the 2022 Hanover facade competition organised by Haus und Grund and the painters' and varnishers' guild.

The substrate consisting of lime-cement plaster from 1892 was first sandblasted in order to then create sample surfaces with sample colour cards from KEIMFARBEN for defining the surface qualities to be achieved. As the stucco and plaster façade had suffered a lot of damage and weathering to the façade surface over the years and the surface structure was inhomogeneous in large parts, the experts chose KEIM Contact-Plus Grob, a mineral slurry coat, to achieve a better surface appearance and to bridge fine hairline cracks. The craftsmen applied the product with a brush. "With the coarse grain - compared to the KEIM Contact fein product with a finer grain - it was possible to achieve better lines or sharpness in the respective stucco and ashlar cornices," explains Klaus Stuckert. KEIM Contact-Plus-Grob is a slurry, fibre-reinforced silicate-based primer coating with pure acrylate additive, glass fibres and high-quality fillers in balanced grain sizes and grain shapes. Stuckert explains further: "On some plaster surfaces, especially on the ashlar surfaces, the mineral fine plaster adhesive mortar KEIM Turado was applied with a smoothing trowel and finely felted with a latex felting disc. This allowed us to achieve an almost identical and nearly the same surface texture as on the entire stucco and plaster surface." KEIM Turado is a universally applicable fibre-reinforced natural white lime-cement-based bonded plaster for interior and exterior use. The finishing touch to this system is the silicate facade paint KEIM Soldalit as a primer and finishing coat. KEIM Soldalit is a silicate facade paint based on a binder combination of silica sol and water glass. - "We have been working with products from Keimfarben for almost three decades and have had only the best experiences with very satisfactory results. In this respect, I was happy to come back to these value products," explains Klaus Stuckert.