Chester Zoo ‘themes’ new £3.5 million facility with Macpherson Marbletex

Using Macpherson Marbletex Smooth, the in-house decorating team at Chester Zoo have used their creative flair to create a ‘tropical rainforest’ backdrop to the ‘Realm of the Red Ape’, a new state of the art home for the Zoo’s rare orang-utans and other Indonesian forest animals.

The new crowd pulling attraction cost over £3.5 million to develop and is Europe’s largest orang-utan facility. Linking to the original ape house is a new two-storey building and three large indoor enclosures. A further two large outdoor enclosures provide an open air habitat complete with tree-like ‘climbing frames’ for the zoo’s six Sumatran and four Bornean orang-utans and a family of noisy gibbons.

All the walls of the animal enclosures and visitor walkways are heavily textured and have been spray-painted with over 700 litres of Macpherson Marbletex in a palette of specially selected shades of green, to tone with the tropical trees, plants and shrubs which climb across them.

Foreman of Building and Civil Engineering Tony Ankers said: “Most professional decorators aim to build up a perfectly even finish on their substrate. We use paint in a rather different way here at the zoo, creating rustic textures, camouflage effects and the illusion of shadows to enhance the visitor experience. It takes a lot of flair and plenty of practice to get the desired effect.

“For the ‘Realm of the Red Ape’ we used a range of natural greens to represent the foliage, plants and mosses of a tropical rainforest and then built up the wall finishes carefully, applying several coats of Marbletex in different colours and dilutions. By blending lots of different shades together we’ve achieved the variegation and shadowy effects we wanted.”

Tony explains why Macpherson Marbletex was specified for the project: “We do everything we possibly can to minimise disruption to the routines and habitats of the animals in our care. Uprooting them in order to redecorate or refurbish their living quarters can be traumatic for them and because of the important breeding programmes we have here, there are few windows of opportunity to carry out this type of work. That’s why it’s absolutely imperative that we extend the redecoration cycles as far as possible by using coatings that are totally dependable and that give us maximum performance and appearance retention. We’ve used Macpherson Trade paints at the zoo for as long as I can remember and we know we can rely on them.

“It goes without saying that we can’t use any products containing dangerous substances or unnecessary solvents. We take no chances where the welfare of the animals is concerned and we also have to protect the tropical plants in our enclosures, so we insist on using water-borne coatings. Marbletex is tough, durable and weather resistant and we know we can use it across cement, stone, render and roughcast, so it’s a great all-rounder for zoo facilities. It has all the environmental credentials we demand and gives us the dependable long term performance we need.”

For further information on Marbletex or any other coating in the Macpherson Trade Paints range please telephone the Customer Relations team on 0870 241 6457.