05/06/2026
Everyone who sees this project asks the same thing. Why not just demolish it and build new. The before was a tired timber chalet sitting low on old brick piers, right on the water, right in the flood line. Single skin, rotten boards. Easy to write off as a teardown.
But here’s what most people miss. On a plot like this you don’t get to start from a blank site. The existing building is the permission. Its footprint, its established use, its right to sit on land you would never get consent to build on from scratch today. Clear it with no plan and you can lose all of that.
So we didn’t treat the old chalet as something to get rid of. We treated it as the thing that made the whole site possible.
The new home keeps the footprint and the relationship to the river, lifts the living spaces clear of the flood risk, and opens the entire water elevation to glass. Same plot. Same right to be there. A completely different building.
The value of an old building is rarely the building. It’s everything the building lets you keep.
If you work with constrained or older sites, where do you land. Replace and protect the consent, or fight for new.
If you’re staring at an old or awkward site wondering whether it’s worth saving, that’s the conversation we like having.
