When the lease was signed there was a hole in the granary roof roughly the size of a dining table, a pigeon problem downstream of it, and no floor at all on the mezzanine. There was also a curved brick ceiling in the old drying kiln that nobody had seen properly since the 1960s, and that is the reason the lease was signed.
What we kept
- The oak trusses, cleaned with a brush and nothing else.
- The cast-iron hoist above the loading door, which still turns and is still connected to nothing.
- The brick of the kiln, unpainted, unsealed and left with two centuries of soot on it.
- The loading door itself, which opens in summer and is the reason the first floor gets booked.
The brief to the architect was one sentence: make it warm and dry, and do not make it look restored.
What we replaced
Everything else. The roof, the floors, the entire ground-floor slab, the drainage, the electrics and a hearth built from scratch by a bricklayer from the next village who had never built one for a restaurant and asked a great many good questions. The plumbing was the expensive part and nobody will ever see it, which is true of most of what a building costs.
The tide still comes to within thirty feet of the door twice a day. On a high spring tide the car park goes, which we mention when you book.
