Adaptive Re-Use Services
The greenest building is the one that already exists. Adaptive re-use is the art of giving a disused structure a second life — a mill, a factory, a warehouse, a heritage building — keeping what matters while making it fit for the next hundred years. We have long experience working with existing buildings and structures, and we treat reuse not as a constraint on good design but as one of the most demanding and rewarding disciplines in architecture.
Our work covers the full process: surveying and understanding an existing structure, assessing what can be kept and what must change, and designing the interventions that bring it back into use — all while navigating the heritage, structural and regulatory realities that come with building on top of what’s already there.
The carbon already spent
Every existing building holds an enormous investment of “embodied carbon” — the energy and emissions locked into its materials and construction, spent decades ago and impossible to recover. Demolishing it throws all of that away, then spends more carbon building its replacement. Reusing it keeps that investment working. As the climate cost of construction becomes impossible to ignore, reuse is shifting from a niche concern to one of the most important things architecture can do — and it’s a shift we’ve been committed to for years.
New architecture within an old shell
Much of our reuse work involves inserting new architectural interventions inside an existing envelope — designing a contemporary building within the walls of an old one. This is a particular craft: the new and the old have to be in genuine dialogue, each given room to be itself. Our Nested House is the idea in its purest form — a complete new structure built within an existing shell, the old envelope retained while an entirely new architecture is nested inside it. At a larger scale, our Eolian Hotel + Residence in Sicily redevelops an existing building wholesale, working new uses and a new façade into and onto the original structure. In both, we let what exists keep its character while introducing elements that are unmistakably of today. Done well, the contrast is the point: the history gives the new work depth, and the new work gives the old structure a reason to stand.
Reclaiming materials, products and fittings
Reuse doesn’t stop at the shell. Wherever we can, we reclaim and reuse materials, products, fixtures and fittings — timber, brick, stone, steel, doors, ironmongery, lighting and more — designing them back into the building rather than sending them to landfill and buying new. Reclaimed materials carry a patina and a story that new ones can’t fake, and every item kept in use is embodied carbon saved and waste avoided. It takes more care to design with what exists than to specify from a catalogue, but the result is richer, more sustainable and more particular to its place.
Conservation as a creative discipline
Adaptive re-use lives in the tension between old and new: deciding what to preserve, what to strip back and what to add, so the result honours the original without becoming a museum of it. It demands both technical care — understanding how an old structure behaves, what it can carry, how it weathers — and the design imagination to see the potential others miss. Handled with skill, the new use and the old fabric strengthen one another, and a building written off as obsolete becomes one of the most characterful places around.
In practice
Our adaptive re-use work has been recognised at the highest level. Our scheme for the Valle dei Mulini paper mills near Amalfi — a strategy for bringing a valley of abandoned industrial ruins back to life — was awarded both Gold and Silver at the Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction. It remains a model for how heritage and sustainability can be the same ambition rather than competing ones.
If you have a building looking for its next chapter, this is work we love. Tell us about it.