2. Before making changes, find out and record all you can about the place
3. Make additions and alterations reversible
4. Intervene as little as possible, retain as much as possible
6. Plan new service installations very carefully
All places need maintenance and on-going repair. If you take the right approach to maintaining and repairing your heritage property, you will save time and money and preserve its value.
Work to heritage places is best governed by seven commonsense principles, derived from long experience. These principles are commonly used to assess building and planning applications relating to heritage places.
Keeping a heritage place in use is very important. A disused building, structure, garden, or other place can quickly deteriorate.
2. Before making changes, find out and record all you can about the place
To increase the value of your property without diminishing its value and appeal, you need to know what give the property its special character. Once you know what's special, you can take care to protect it during any work. Careless work can risk destroying the very aspects that make your property valuable.
Research your property and then record your findings so you (and any future owners or managers) will have permanent access to them. A full record of your heritage property would normally include some historical research, drawings of the place, and photographs of its present condition.
3. Make additions and alterations reversible
When considering work to a heritage place, plan for it to be reversible. You (or any future owner or manager) should be able to remove new work without damage to the underlying building fabric, leaving the place as you found it. This ensures the essential form and integrity of the heritage place is kept.
Be careful when using new products that can irreversibly damage older building materials, such as new waterproofing finishes on old masonry, or aluminium-coated roof sheeting with galvanised guttering and downpipes.
4. Intervene as little as possible, retain as much as possible
When it comes to heritage buildings, think minimum intervention, maximum retention. Do as little as necessary to achieve the desired effect, and keep as much as you can of the building's significant fabric. If you plan alterations on this basis, you will reduce costs and protect your property's integrity.
Try to design alterations so that they have the smallest possible effect on the original design and building material. Wherever possible, repair any deteriorated building materials rather than replace it.
Many heritage buildings have been altered over the years, and past alterations may themselves have heritage value. Alterations are evidence of your property's history and development, and alterations that have heritage significance should be retained. Research on your property will help you discover which alterations are worth keeping, and which are best removed. Remember, you do not have to 'strip back' your property to its 'original' state in order to restore or maintain its integrity.
Partial demolition can play a constructive role in conservation. By removing badly designed alterations, you can enhance your property's appearance, simplify maintenance, improve natural lighting and ventilation, and make access easier.
6. Plan new service installations very carefully
Services such as bathrooms and kitchen fitouts often wear out or become obsolete before other elements of a heritage building. Plan new kitchens or bathrooms carefully to avoid unnecessary changes.
Older heritage buildings were built before the introduction of electrical, waste plumbing and air-conditioning services, so these installations must carefully designed to fit in unobtrusively. Air-conditioning can also cause deterioration, particularly in old masonry buildings.
When you insert new services, design a neat installation that blends in. Service pipes should be identified at an early stage, marked on site, and shown on the drawings giving actual size and position. Where services are to be threaded through structures, seek advice from an architect and structural engineer.
Supervise work closely to ensure installers do not damage your property's structure or detail. Ideally, installers should understand and respect the values that must be protected in your building.
Being honest in your design means ensuring any changes or additions to your property are compatible with its original structure, but do not try to masquerade as original material.
Changes or additions to your property should be compatible with its original proportions and design. Thoughtless changes can conflict with the original structure, and destroy important original material.
At the same time, new work should be recognisable as such. Well designed alterations and additions blend with the historic original but their design and materials can be recognised as a product of their time.
Accept that original features that have been lost through lack of maintenance cannot be fully replaced. Replica facades and interiors can never be wholly adequate replacements for lost originals. They cannot recapture the qualities of original materials and work, nor the minor irregularities and mellowing that gave character to the original. These are often more important aspects of a feature than its design.
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