THE LAST PLASTER SHOP: Ornamental Plasterer Lorna Kollmeyer on preserving Victorian San Francisco, the business of a rare trade, and becoming a living archive

Episode notes

In this episode of The Trades Show, host Briana Ottoboni sits down with Lorna Kollmeyer, a sculptor, mold maker, and caster of ornamental plaster who owns the last plaster shop in San Francisco, inside her studio at the Hunters Point Shipyard. Their conversation traces how the whole trade fell into Lorna’s lap — from a young basketball star who landed in San Francisco in her early twenties with no plan, enchanted by a city where no two Victorians looked alike, to the couple restoring Victorian flats who taught her to strip originals and pour her own molds, to the day someone asked if she wanted to buy a plaster business and she answered, “No, but I’ll ask my friends,” before buying it herself.

Lorna walks through the Majestic Hotel — her very first job, a corner building of mermaids and egg-and-dart she bid at twenty thousand dollars when the next bid came in at fifty-six, learning sculpture from her girlfriends as they went — and into what ornamental plaster actually is: the ceiling medallions, corbels, and crown moldings that make San Francisco’s architecture its own quirky self. She opens up the process, from stripping a paint-caked original to laying rubber and building a mother mold, and the archive it has become — thousands of pieces brought in by homeowners who cared enough to save them, a living library she calls the city’s collection, not her own.

She’s candid about the edges of the work — the ultra-wealthy gut-jobs that hollow out a Victorian’s interior, the plaster shops that closed as commercial rents climbed, the fight to keep her shop and the Shipyard’s artist community from being knocked down for condos — and where the craft is going as 3D scanning saves a three-month sculpting job and a new generation of thirty-somethings tells her they’re starving for things not spat out by a machine. Whether you’re a maker, a restorer, or someone who has ever loved an old house, this episode is a masterclass in learning on the job, building a business that outlasts you, and becoming the custodian of a city’s history.

The Trades Show is an interview series on location with modern artisans exploring what it means to be human: the ability to create with our hands.