The decision was made to gut the apartment and start again, utilising a purpose-build steel framework to create a new, larger mezzanine (three bedrooms), lots of glass to increase the ingress of light (including a glass-floored hallway on the mezzanine level), and natural timbers to balance the palette.
As part of the gutting, the wall, floor and ceiling linings were also stripped away, revealing the original board-formed concrete columns and slabwork of the factory.
Archer and his client were delighted at the find, deciding to embrace these features as both visible and structural connections to the building's past. He describes the exposed concrete ceiling, in particular, as "....rough as guts,, but that's what we love about it."
"It looks like they used some sort of concrete blockwork (in the slab) and then poured around them. I'm guessing it must have been, at the time, a cheap way to construct a big concrete floor in a large industrial building.