Restoration, refurbishment and refunctioning of a first-floor home in a PH building in San Telmo, Buenos Aires, with 120 m² of roof terrace. A staged project, told in thirteen milestones.
The work was the restoration, refurbishment and refunctioning of a first-floor home on Humberto Primo street. The main interventions were in the bathrooms and the kitchen, because a home more than a hundred years old did not meet the requirements of present-day life.
The building sits in a historic protection area and arrived with contemporary additions in breach of the code, visible from the street. Resolving that was part of the brief, and it is the first milestone on this page.
It was carried out in stages over many years. What I want to show is how a long project on an old building gets organized: what is demolished and what is kept, how the new work is housed, and how services are coordinated in a building that was never designed for them.
The photos are in chronological order according to the date recorded inside each image, not the file name; the few without one go at the end of each milestone. The milestones overlap because the work advanced in stages. Each one opens a gallery with all of its photos. Faces of people in the photos have been blurred.
The PH was bought with a burden: it carried constructions in breach of the Buenos Aires Building Code, in a historic protection area. They were contemporary additions, unrelated to the history of the building, and they could be seen from the street. We took the problem on as our own and proposed a solution: partially demolish the structures visible from the street and give the new construction an angle that makes it invisible, without losing a single square meter of usable covered area inside.
Before the main work, the stairs and floors were protected with cardboard. Walls and slabs were opened to run drains and pipes, the windows on the roof terrace were removed and the rooms began to be leveled.
The first photos show the existing timber beams and ceilings. Then the floor finishes and the non-compliant volumes were demolished, with the rubble brought down in bags, and the new concrete stair up to the roof terrace was built, from formwork to plastering.
Water and drainage pipes, electrical conduits chased into the walls and plaster over brick masonry. At the end of the series, the booster pump and the two tankless water heaters.
On top of the partly demolished terrace walls, the steel structure of the new roof with glass panels was erected. The sheet metal and the zinc gutters came next.
Air conditioning was solved with insulated ducts that use the space between the ceilings and the roof structure and run above the cornices. The last photos show the outdoor units on the roof.
The original plaster ceilings, which previous owners had demolished, were rebuilt with their cornices and molded panels. The last photos show them finished and painted.
Complete renovation, from the services to travertine floors and wall finishes, keeping the original oval stained-glass window. The series follows the process through to the glass shower screens, vanities and fixtures.
Complete restoration of floors and openings, saving every original piece: sanded and repaired floors, the stair with its handrail and hardware, and timber shutters and doors with their mechanisms. New windows were added where the work called for them.
Wall painting, the stone paving, iron railings and plastering of the new enclosures. The last photo shows the patio balustrade.
Custom iron-and-glass doors and enclosures: the welded frames before installation and, later, their fitting and glazing on site.
The kitchen area was completely redesigned, with timber cabinets, a range and oven, and light veined stone countertops. The photos go from the empty room to the installation of the countertops.
Living and dining room with timber floors and a fireplace, bedrooms, travertine bathrooms with the oval stained-glass window, the timber stair, the glazed patio, the roof terrace and the integrated kitchen, now furnished and decorated. The first seven photos are from an earlier stage, before the kitchen was finished; the rest show the finished, decorated home.
Sheets I prepared to resolve and communicate parts of the work: the travertine bathroom, the checkerboard floor, the patio railing and planters over a point cloud, the kitchenette, the stair and the cornice. I made them at different times and with different tools, and some are in English.
Conceptual diagrams of plumbing, electrical and air-conditioning services, plus an integrated axonometric, drawn over the CAD survey of the home. They are a conceptual proposal made over the survey, not the design the work was built from, and they are not an executive design: calculations and verification belong to licensed specialists.
How I approach existing buildings is described in BIM for Renovation and Existing Conditions / Scan-to-BIM.
Sheets labeled in Spanish.
My restoration experience is as the architect on built projects, not as a heritage-conservation specialist. Photos are from the project archive.
On the choice to keep and restore rather than demolish, see sustainable architecture and reuse.
Tell me about your project and I will send a time and price range, typically within one business day. No obligation, no long-term contract.