In renovating Stronvar, we’ve created an insulated shell inside the original fabric of the building, bringing each wall in by about 120mm and increasing the effective thickness of the walls from around 800mm to nearly a metre – this is a not insubstantial building.

What we didn’t want to do was lose the simple solidity of the rooms, much of the visual impression of this being given by the simple fact that all corners (the “Arrises”) inside the building were rounded plaster rather than square edges. A small thing, but a big part of the whole.

So we’ve recreated the same profile on the new walls, rounding the corners of the internal plasterboard and building up a curve with plaster to give a very slightly irregular profile rather than the machine-straight profile of a modern edge. And of course the time required to do this is costing a small fortune and creating enough dust for a Saharan sandstorm. Bet Wimpey doesn’t have this problem.