What we found.

The building was put up in 1934 as a salt store, and it had been divided into eleven rooms by the time we saw it in 2023. Behind the partitions was a concrete frame in good condition, nine bays long, with a clear height of four and a half meters.

Almost all of our work was removal. We took out every internal wall, two added floors, and a rear extension, which gave back a single volume of 240 square meters with light from both long faces.

One room, four thresholds.

Rather than rebuild rooms, we placed four freestanding volumes along the north wall: a kitchen core, a bathroom, a pair of bedrooms, and a stair to the roof. None of them touches the ceiling, so the original frame reads continuously overhead.

The gaps between the volumes do the work that corridors usually do. Each one is wide enough to stand in and to hold a door, a bench, or a bookcase, and they give the long room a rhythm at roughly six-meter intervals.

Materials and cost.

The frame was left as found, washed and sealed. New work is lime plaster, oak, and blackened steel, held to three materials so the volumes read as objects set inside an older building.

The project was delivered in fourteen months at 1,850 euros per square meter, which was under the budget set in 2023. The saving came almost entirely from demolition, since the frame needed no structural repair.

Living in it.

The owners moved in during the spring of 2025 and have since reported one problem and one surprise. The problem is acoustic: a single long room carries sound, and they added a rug and two curtains in the first month.

The surprise is the roof. We treated the stair as circulation, and it has turned into the room the family uses most between May and September.