The three existing front doors set the plan, with one apartment per front door. We stripped out the suspended ceilings and external air-conditioning plant, recovering around half a metre of height and uncovering the ornate plaster ceilings of the four-metre ground floor. We reopened a window bricked up in the 1950s to draw daylight into a basement bedroom, and added refurbished sash windows, secondary glazing and MVHR for comfort and quiet. Opening up the basement revealed no damp-proofing anywhere, and in one room a floor sitting over nothing but paving slabs: a listed building still capable of surprising us.