Adapting to the Existing

Every place imposes its own rightness. Old stone does not call for the same care as contemporary concrete. One breathes, absorbs, is repaired with lime and rejects the cement that suffocates it, the other calls for frank gestures, clean repairs, an almost industrial precision. To intervene in a building is first to learn its language, to understand how it was assembled, with which hands, which tools, which materials of the region, before deciding how to answer it. A render, a mortar, an assembly are never neutral. Chosen against the logic of the place, they wound it, chosen with it, they extend it.

This is why we adapt the choice of materials, textures and building methods to each project. Here a floor is redone in solid wood, nailed as it originally was, there a contemporary slab accepts the smooth concrete that resembles it. Textures too have their truth. The grain of an old wall cannot bear the perfect flatness of a plasterboard sheet, and an earth or lime render, applied with a trowel, will give back the play of light the material calls for. Building rightly is not building in the old style out of principle, nor to fashion out of reflex, it is tuning every gesture to what is already there.

For choosing to live in a place that has a history is also choosing to rewrite it. Not freezing it as decor, nor erasing it to start from zero, but writing its next chapter while taking into account what is present, the traces, the wear, yesterday's repairs that already tell several lives. Our interventions own their era, they do not imitate, but they take their place within this continuity. The place remains recognisable to those who knew it, and becomes fully inhabitable for those who will live in it.