Thanks for the post Tom. I was going to do a post addressing the attachment of coconut to the putz houses. To do the subject justice I was going to do a series of photo. Lucky for me Tom already posted a set so we can start the discussion. Please note photos number 4 & 5. These are close ups of the balding roof. Thanks to the quality of the photos you'll notice the roughness and texture the the underlying stucco/gesso. Now look at some of the coconut that is still attached. You'll see that the coconut is embedded into the stucco/Gesso. The technique that the Japanese used was to slake the plaster of Paris (
http://users.zoominternet.net/~yvianne/ ... aster.html) this makes a pure Gesso. Once they had the Gesso they would incorporate glue into the mixture. This mixture was then colored. One at a time they would coat a section of the putz house with the wet Gesso and then dunk the house into a vat of the desired coconut thus embedding the coconut down into the Gesso then let that area dry. They may have taken large hand fulls of the coconut and jammed it on to the area being covered. Either way what you wind up with is the desired 3D look of the coconut standing up instead of laying down. I'm fortunate enough that I can make lots of coconut so I can put a thick coat of glue on a needed area and jam the coconut into place instead of patting it down/on. That of course flattens the coconut and defeats our desired effect. When I build brand new designed houses I use the original Japanese methods. The results are convincing enough to believe the finished piece is vintage. Out of all the houses I have, repaired or torn apart I have never seen the coconut applied/glued over a finished smooth surface. Let me know what you have observed. Thanks for the photos Tom. Pete