When we told Harbourline we wanted to keep the frame at Meridian Works, they assumed we were proposing the cheap option. We were not. Retention was harder, slower to design, and required a structural survey nobody had budgeted for.

The numbers

Embodied carbon came in at roughly a third of an equivalent new build. Operational carbon dropped 61% against the existing baseline. The building let fully before practical completion, at a rent 12% above the local new-build average.

The argument

Tenants paid more for the old frame. Not because it was sustainable, though it was, but because a 1930s grain warehouse is a better room than anything we would have built new on that plot.