In the studio of Melissa Smith and Sachin Bandukwala

During the restoration, alongside orthographic drawings, they created a photogrammetric scan. Between the visual evidence and their architectural reading, the structure disclosed itself incrementally, almost archaeologically. Among the discoveries were unusually deep jack arches on the ground floor, remnants of the house’s earliest incarnation as a single-storey structure. In 1932, permission was granted for a balcony to extend four feet into the street. Today, the house rises three storeys: the first two inherited, the third a contemporary accretion. In Specters of Marx, Derrida writes of apparitions that survive the exorcisms of newness and continue to exert their influence upon the present. Read spatially, this residence-turned-studio becomes a living archive: a palimpsest in which time has not been erased but reasoned with. The years had been unkind to the built form. Rusting steel deformed the masonry, while an old I-section, introduced to cannibalise the jack arches in pursuit of a cantilever, had itself begun to fail. The endangered stained-glass panels on the façade required meticulous intervention. When reconstructing the failed slab, they punctured it with a light well.

The discoveries continued: a single-panel door that may once have served as an older exit, and a 70 ft well beneath the flooring. “The water level is now around 380 ft. So we cannot gather water from the well. But the roof that we have added brings the rain down through the building and drops it into the rainwater harvesting tank,” she says. On the second floor under the pitched roof is also room for temporary inhabitation. And a piano. “I’ve never had a space for a piano, we decided that it was time,” she laughs. She adds, “We wanted to respond to what the building offered. It is our space, we could experiment and try things.” Restoration, when done right, is a negotiation with what remains and what is desired. Time is, indeed, out of joint here, but in the most intriguing sense. The exposed steel, punctured slab and out-of-order well do not mourn an absent ideal of originality. What emerges is a ricochet between remembrance and anticipation: a mercurial presence neither old nor new, but perpetually becoming. A Derridean apparition not of what once was, but of a future that has only begun to arrive.

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