Thanks for your help. I thought it would be a matter of using a displacment map to make the decorative parts - thats propably my inexperience. But I think you are all right. Make the object in MOI (what about sketchup?) then use zbrush to add texture.

Its rather expensive though, to say that I will not be using all the freeform modelling functions. I wounder if the reduced version would do enough for my uses.

Simon