Diespeker & Co has revealed the company’s most complex bespoke terrazzo project to date; a dazzling, fully working indoor fountain.
The fountain is central to the ‘indoor piazza’ style of one of London’s newest Italian eateries, Vico with its tantalizing ice cream parlour. Vico’s menu is influenced by South-Central Italy, offering, alongside Vico’s popular street foods, Roman pizzas, Neapolitan pastas and Apulian vegetables. Desserts include Neapolitan pastries and sundaes of Gelupo gelato.
For this project, the terrazzo team came up with a number of unique terrazzo/chipping combinations to give the client the effect they desired, including an unusual bright blue base to give the effect of Lapis. The blue colouring was sourced in America, with glass chippings imported from Canada. In addition, brass rods were cut into 5mm lengths and painstakingly bonded item by item to the mould by hand.
The fountain sections were created using bespoke moulds, and required the insertion of complicated piping, to feed the water into the fountain and allow it to flow steadily down the outside of the structure. After the moulds were set, the terrazzo underwent hand grinding and polishing to create a smooth, high gloss finish.
The fountain took several months to create using bespoke moulds and was transported to its final location in nine sections.
“This was the most complex item we have ever made in our London workshops,” said Diespeker’s Managing Director, John Krause.
“It stretched our production skills to the max, including working out the plumbing elements of the fountain – something we’ve never had to do before. However, having something so creative to work on was really exciting, and we know there’s nothing like it anywhere else.”
As well as the fountain, Diespeker made two stunning counter top units for the ice cream parlour, one in bespoke light blue with pink infill terrazzo spelling the name, Gelupo, and the other in a bespoke yellow terrazzo.
With more than 135 years as experts in terrazzo production and installation, Diespeker has well-honed skills. The company uses traditional methods to achieve high quality results that are truly bespoke.
