The first rooms at The Limeworks are finished. Residence 2.04 — a Hopper Loft on the second floor of the kiln hall — has been fitted out ahead of programme as the show residence, and for the past month it has been where every decision on the sample board either earned its place or lost it. The photographs will follow in the autumn plates; this note records what changed on the way.
We chose 2.04 deliberately. It is not the largest residence, nor the best aspected; it is the most typical, which makes it the most honest. If the specification works here — one room to the water, one to the flue wall, seven metres of the original 1864 brick running through the plan — it works everywhere.
Some decisions, confirmed. The limewash is the palest of the three Somerset mixes we trialled, applied in four coats and burnished by hand; in the afternoon it does something with the western light that the sample panel never quite promised. The floor is quarter-sawn oak in 180mm boards, laid parallel with the canal, finished with a hardwax oil and nothing else.
Some decisions, reversed. The bathroom terrazzo — cast with lime aggregate recovered from the calcining floor — was originally specified honed. In the room it read as polite, so it is now ground coarser, and the flecks of kiln lime sit proud enough to find with a thumb. The brass switch plates arrived lacquered, the maker’s default; they went back. Brass at The Limeworks is unlacquered everywhere, and will darken where hands actually go, which is the point of it.
Residence 2.04 opens to the register in September, by appointment, one party at a time. It is dressed with furniture but not with fictions — no borrowed books, no staged breakfast. The rooms are the argument, and we would rather you heard them make it themselves.