The house had been improved three times — in the seventies, in the nineties, and once more around 2010 — and each improvement had removed something that could not be bought back.
The brief was to return it. The difficulty with returning a building is knowing which year to return it to, and the honest answer is usually none of them. A house that has stood for seventy years is not a single design; it is a sequence of decisions, some good.
We kept the 1970s kitchen, which was better made than anything that followed it. We removed the 2010 flooring, which had been laid over the original cement tiles rather than instead of them — a small mercy, and the reason the room could be recovered at all.
The hardest conversations were about what to leave alone. Restraint is expensive because it is invisible: the owner pays for judgement and receives, apparently, nothing. What they actually receive is a house that still has its own history in it.