Living room in a listed farmhouse

The brief

A stone farmhouse with parts dating to the early seventeenth century, Grade II listed, bought by a couple who had wanted an old house for thirty years and had finally got one. The living room was the room they used most and liked least. It was cold from October to April, dark at any time of year, and the previous owners had refitted it in about 1986.

They wanted it warm, they wanted to be able to read in it, and they wanted the 1980s taken back out. They were clear that they did not want a museum. They have grandchildren and a wood burner and no interest in a room that has to be tiptoed through.

What made it difficult

Listed status covers the whole building, inside and out, and it covers character rather than a list of protected items. That means the question is never simply whether a thing is old, it is whether the change affects what makes the building significant. Consent was needed for the fireplace, the plaster, and any fixing into historic fabric.

The walls had been skimmed in gypsum over the original lime plaster at some point, which is the single most common damaging thing done to old houses. Gypsum holds water against a solid wall that has no cavity and no damp proof course and needs to breathe. The bottom 600mm of the north wall was damp because of it.

The fireplace was a reconstituted stone surround with a raised hearth, fitted into an opening that was clearly much larger behind it. Nobody knew what was back there. The ceiling beams had eleven downlights drilled into them.

The floor was flagstone laid directly on earth. Insulating it properly meant lifting the flags, digging, and relaying, which would have raised the floor level and left the door to the hall opening onto a step. We did not do it.

What we did

We applied for listed building consent with a heritage statement, a set of existing and proposed drawings, and photographs of every element we proposed to touch. The conservation officer visited once, asked for one change, and approved it in just over four months. The change was to leave the raised hearth in place rather than reinstate a flush one, on the grounds that there was no evidence of what had originally been there and a guess is worse than an honest later layer.

The gypsum came off the two external walls and went back as lime plaster on a lime base coat, finished with a clay paint. That is the part of the job that fixed the damp, and it fixed it without a chemical injection, a membrane or a new skirting.

Behind the stone effect surround was a 1.6m wide inglenook with a chamfered oak bressummer and a bread oven to one side, blocked with breeze block. Opening it up was the best day of the project. A cast iron stove went in on the existing hearth with a flexible liner, and the bread oven is now where the logs live.

The eleven downlights came out. The holes in the beam were filled with oak plugs cut from the same section, which does not hide them and is not meant to. Lighting is now four wall lights on the plastered walls, two floor lamps, and nothing at all in the ceiling. Nothing was fixed into the beams.

Warmth came from three unglamorous things: the lime plaster, a wool insulation quilt laid over the first floor joists above the room, and heavy interlined curtains on a pole that projects far enough to clear the reveal. The room now holds heat overnight.

The full account of what consent involves is set out in what it is really like to work on a listed building.

What it cost

Build cost was £29,700 against a range of £27,000 to £33,000. Lime work is skilled and slow and it is the reason the figure is where it is. The lime plastering alone was £8,400.

Consent costs sat on top: our heritage statement and drawings at £1,400, and no local authority fee, because listed building consent applications do not carry one. Our fee was £6,370, being a £3,400 design package plus project management at 10 per cent of the build cost. Lime is the one material we will not hand to a client to programme on their own, because it is the timings that go wrong rather than the work. The stove and liner were £2,900 fitted by a registered installer.

What we would do differently

We would have opened up a small area of the fireplace before submitting the application rather than after. Investigative opening up can itself need consent, which is why we did not, but a conversation with the conservation officer at the start would probably have got us permission for a 300mm test hole. Knowing what was behind that surround would have changed the drawings we submitted and saved a variation later.