Hasta La Ideas

Brooklyn-based Benjamin Lai spends most of his days in multimillion dollar residences, quietly creating. Some days he’s high up on a scaffolding under a cathedral ceiling, other days he’s on his hands and knees at the base of an Ionic column, still others he’s sitting on the client’s $20,000 toilet trying to judge how the bathroom will look from that specific vantage point. “I learned that the view from the toilet is one of the most important,” he says. “When clients sit there, they have the time to really scrutinize your work.”

That work consists of using a brush, a combination of liquids and a strange-looking selection of tools to render a surface into existence with a highly specific blend of artistry and science, a kind of alchemy that many attempt but few truly understand. People hire Ben because he’s one of the best, and he has pretty good job security because few people can do what he does at the level he does it.

Looks like real marble, but it ain’t.

Even for the super-rich, it turns out, money can’t buy everything. A billionaire might have their heart set on having a bathroom made from a type of marble that is extinct. A designer might spec out a type of wood that might be practically impossible to acquire in volume or work into the desired shapes. A client building an addition on his mansion might require the new oak paneling exactly match the original stuff, even though the craftsman who did the original work died more than 100 years ago and the exact stain, tone and aging, to say nothing of the carving work, are impossible to replicate. When these situations come up, Ben Lai gets a phone call.

The technical name for what Lai does is peinture decorative or decorative painting, a disappointingly mundane term that does not adequately convey the scope of his skillset. It requires artistic technique, chemical mastery, and an ability to judge light and color on a level that computers and machines are incapable of. (The story of how he traveled overseas to learn the art, which we’ll cover in a future entry, is as fascinating as the jobs he does.) Lai picks up work both from his own clients and through a prominent firm he freelances for, Christianson Lee Studios, the go-to decorative painting firm for many high-end interior designers.

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