New lime pointing to front brickwork with fine-gauged white tuck, gently blends in with remaining historic fragments and stubborn 1970s cement.

The original joinery colour was established from historic paint analysis. Layers of gloss masonry paint were removed from the Roman cement vermiculated decorative architrave around the front door, consolidated with minor, local repairs. The concrete steps were stripped and left in place, appreciated as part of the historic development of the building.

Tuck pointing is a highly specialised Georgian technique, designed to give the impression of fine mortar joints in square-cut bricks. This technique uses cheap, irregular bricks with flush, brick-coloured mortar, scored with a narrow groove into which a thin ribbon of contrasting lime mortar is pressed or ‘tucked’.

This technique became very popular in the mid 1700s and is intrinsic to the character of this type of building.

Due to the skill required for tuck pointing, the expense, but also the lack of knowledge of owners & professionals, even listed buildings often see the original tuck pointing raked out and repointed with a chunky irregular joint, up to 15 mm thick, totally changing the appearance of the building from "fine Georgian" to "rustic". The original builders would have been horrified!

In this case, most of the original tuck pointing had survived. Rather than destroying the original fabric, we chose to limit our intervention to replacing the pointing only where repairs were needed. This saved out client money, and preserved as much of the original as possible.

We painted the stairs in a Georgian drab colour. Original plaster repaired and left unpainted between the carefully decorated staircase joinery, skirting boards and dado rail. The lime paint of the walls above is layered in custom colours resonating with the traces of historic colours uncovered.

Lime-washed walls and floorboards gently rubbed with wire wool and oiled. Windows and Joinery were carefully repaired and re-painted.

Joinery detail of new under-stairs storage to laundry-shower room.

New bathroom joinery concealing the boiler and

We opened up the corner of the 1910 rear extension using metal-framed double-glazed windows and door to bring the afternoon sunlight deep into the house.

1830s / 1910s HOUSE

Trinity Square, Margate

2021

This Grade II listed, 1830s house in Margate had been divided into two flats and poorly treated. Doubling in size in 1910, the back half of the house and the roof were all 80 years younger than the front half, and the interior had been significantly altered with a new staircase.

Our conservation works reunited the whole house with a new owner-occupier, removed all poor-quality post-1910 works and made discreet new interventions to suit a contemporary family home, such as a large new laundry-bathroom in one of the lower ground floor rooms. Our main alteration was to open up the ground floor walls internally and externally to better connect the living areas with the sunny back yard.

The completed house is a collage of good quality and characterful interventions from the past 200 years, with each material repaired, gently treated to work as a whole, and made to last another generation.

Our approach was to retain the sense of age and the passing of time through each material, rather than to 'renovate', which literally means to 'make new'. So, for example, we chose to not paint the rendered window reveals and arches, but simply to strip the modern white paint off them, and rub them back to gently blend in with the tonal range of the surrounding brickwork. The brickwork pointing - which would originally have been 'tuck' to give the appearance of crisp, neat bricks - was repaired only where damage had been caused, rather than re-pointing the whole facade.

Contractor: Green Tree Projects Ltd

Engineer: HFK Ltd

Photographs by Studio Sam Causer