Confitería La Ideal

This guide to Confitería La Ideal in Buenos Aires opens with a question: what color were the ballroom's columns before decades of repainting buried the original finish? It follows restorers as they strip back nine layers of paint hunting for the 1912 finish chosen by grocer Manuel Rosendo Fernández, and a crew that spent over a year reviving the cedar panels and gilded dome. Listen for what the columns reveal once you know how many colors they hid.