I’ve shown at least 100 people through the Flamingo Palace, our renovated Victorian house in Brixton, over the last several months. Upon crossing the threshold, at least 90% of those people commented on one of two things (or both) right off the bat: the newly restored Oregon pine floors and/or the pressed ceilings.

Trixie and I in our lounge, showing off the two things people comment on most: the restored wood floors and the pressed ceilings.

Like many early 20th-century South African houses, the Flamingo Palace (built in the 1920s) has pressed ceilings — also called pressed steel ceilings or tin ceilings. While a couple of my previous Joburg homes have had pressed ceilings in some of the rooms, this is my first time living in a house whose ceilings are fully pressed from front to back. Every room, including the bathrooms, has a different ceiling design.

The kitchen ceiling.

The guest bedroom/office. FYI, our ceilings are all painted the same color white. But the light is different in every room and I’m bad at color-correction.

The bedroom ceiling is my favorite of all the designs. The ceiling fan we bought from The Lighting Warehouse somehow matches it perfectly.

Our lounge/dining area/kitchen has three different ceiling patterns.

After we moved into the house, I felt exhausted for weeks. I spent hours lying face-up on the bed and the couch, staring at the ceilings, and it was very soothing. Looking up at a ceiling with a beautiful pattern pressed into it is much more enjoyable than looking up at a plain white ceiling.

The lounge ceiling with one of our thrifted light fixtures.

The more I stared up at these ceilings, the more remarkable they became to me. I also realized that despite being aware of pressed ceilings for many years, I had never thought much about why they’re here or where they came from. So I did some research.

The World of Pressed Ceilings

I didn’t find much specific information about the history of pressed ceilings in South Africa. As it turns out, these ceilings were invented in America. The Wikipedia entry about them is unsurprisingly U.S.-centric, mentioning the Rainbow Nation only once in the following throw-away sentence: “They were also used in South Africa.” (Pressed ceilings were popular in Australia too, but apparently never made it to the rest of the world.)

I can’t recall ever seeing a pressed ceiling in my extensive travels around the United States. But pressed ceilings are ubiquitous and impossible to miss in central Joburg and other South African towns that mushroomed into being around the country’s gold and diamond booms. (I haven’t been to Australia and don’t know if pressed ceilings are still a thing there.)

So, what’s the deal? Have American pressed ceilings mostly disappeared due to my countrymen’s relentless appetite for home renovation? Are they still around and I just haven’t noticed them? Are they more noticeable in South Africa because this is a smaller country with fewer different design styles? If anyone has answers, I’d love to know.

Anyway, as the story goes: Pressed ceilings became a trend in late-19th-century America as an alternative to the elaborate, more expensive plasterwork ceilings popular in Victorian England and Europe at the time. Tin ceilings, as most Americans seem to call them, were historically painted white to look like plaster, and were more durable and easier to produce than plasterwork ceilings. Tin ceilings offered the added advantage of being fire-retardant. The ceiling tiles were made by sending thin sheets of metal through heavy machines that stamped patterns onto them using handmade moulds.

I’m still confused as to how there can be so many different ceiling designs in seemingly infinite shapes and sizes. I feel like nearly every pressed ceiling I meet has a totally unique design that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

Our entrance hall.

Pressed ceilings are still produced in South Africa today. I know this because we had all of our ceilings restored by a Joburg-based company called (fittingly) PressedCeilings.co.za. PressedCeilings.co.za restores and repairs old ceilings and also makes new ones using both metal and fiber glass.

Our new master bathroom used to be a hallway, which now has a wall in the middle. So the ceiling in here was reproduced (with the same design as before) using fiber glass.

I really wanted to visit the PressedCeilings.co.za factory before writing this post — I think seeing the production process in real life and talking to the people who make the ceilings might answer a lot of my questions. I haven’t been able to make that happen yet though. So for now, the South African pressed ceiling mysteries continue.

In the meantime, I’ll keep enjoying ours.