Heritage Restoration - Restore the inner-city Newcastle heritage to its original facade

The ever popular inner-city Newcastle heritage has become a favourite by both the locals and visitors. Our clients have told us, since the completion of this project a lot of tourists are stopping and taking photos. Apart from some un wanted attention, this shows us that people want to see and experience our heritage. In Australia we have very young heritage, so we need to re-think what might be heritage, what needs to be protected or in this case, what needs to be restored.

We studied photos from the era of this build to source to re-correct the facade of this property. The (re) introduction of missing cast iron lace panels and the design of the entry tiles mixed with colour matching brings this place to its former glory. It was great to see the neighbour be inspired by our work and follow suit.

This project was a prototype for the following questions:

• How do we really do restoration work?
• To restore, how can historic photos influence our decisions
• Is a non heritage item within a heritage context the right conservation for Australia?
• How can colour be used in restoration if our historic images are black and white?
• Is restoration important?