The craft

How a building is chosen, how it is designed and what must be settled before it is too late.

Refurbishing to operate is not refurbishing to sell.

Whoever refurbishes to sell optimises the square metre and hands over. Whoever refurbishes to operate has to live for years with every decision taken: with the noise between units, with the route the cleaning trolley takes, with the room nobody set aside for the laundry. What follows is the method we apply so that living with the building stays sustainable.

Choosing a building

Shape comes before price. A building with a courtyard and two entrances allows a sensible division; one with a single narrow staircase and no courtyard forces expensive solutions that rarely work.

We check the listed status and which elements cannot be touched, the state of floor slabs and roofs, the party wall with the neighbours and the noise coming off the street. And we look at the doorway opposite: an excellent building on a street that empties at night is not an excellent building.

What is studied before buying

Permitted use under the planning rules, conditions for tourist accommodation, and the number of units the regulations actually allow rather than the number that could be drawn. We review the registry position, charges, any existing horizontal division and, where there is none, what it takes to create it.

We estimate how long the administration will really take, not how long it should. A year of permits is a financing cost to be carried from day one, and it is why many deals that look good are not.

How it is designed

Two separate routes are drawn from the start: the guest's and the staff's. If they meet on the landing carrying dirty linen, the design is wrong however good the photographs are.

Sound insulation between units and towards the staircase is decided on paper, not on site. Services are left accessible, because one day they will have to be opened without gutting a bathroom. And room is kept for what is never seen: laundry, linen store, cleaning room, bins.

What must be settled on site

Some decisions have no remedy later: the position of the drainage stacks, insulation of floors and party walls, ventilation of internal kitchens, step-free access at the entrance. Correcting any of them afterwards means opening the building again and stopping the operation.

That is why the works are run with the people who will operate the building sitting at the same table, rather than handing a closed design to a contractor.

Handover to operation

Licences and registration in order before the first booking. Equipment, inventory, utility contracts, cleaning procedures and unit manuals written and handed to the team.

The first months are watched closely: that is when the defects nobody saw appear, and when the way the building is really used gets settled, which is never quite the way it was planned.

On current operations

We do not publish records of our operations or their financial data. Anyone with a professional reason to know may request it in writing and will be answered in private.

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