1835 HOUSE
Hawley Square, Margate
2017+
This terraced house in Hawley Square, Margate has served many uses since it was built around 1835. Initially a fashionable holiday home for the upper classes spending the season down from London by the sea, it soon found itself a packed boarding house for holiday-making workers in the summer and a feather & fur workshop in the winter, perhaps supporting the actors, actresses and audience of the Theatre Royal next door.
From the 1970s the house became offices, first for the local authority, and later for a firm of solicitors, until the '90s when it was used only for storing files.
In 2015 Sam Causer bought the house to become his home, with the architecture studio in the mews behind. The refurbishment has allowed experimentation into a form of 'light-touch' conservation, with an (almost) strict adherence to SPAB principles of repair and contemporary intervention only, as distinct from 'renovation' where old surfaces and materials are made to appear new.
One wing of the house is now available for short holidays, the income from which funds the continuing programme of repair.
The work has been carried out in many phases.
Contractors: MAM Builders; Green Tree Projects
Engineer: Osborne Edwards Ltd
Photographs by David Grandorge
and Studio Sam Causer