Maria Speake was approaching the end of her degree at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, part of the Glasgow School of Art, when she informed her tutors that she wanted to create a salvage yard for her final year dissertation. It was the early 1990s.
“That went down like a lead balloon,” she recalls, perched on a long, sleek sofa in her airy Kensal Green studio. “They couldn’t understand how that might make a building, or how fragments of buildings are important enough in themselves.” She’d even found the perfect site for the project, next to the city’s 37-acre Victorian cemetery: “I was totally in love with the Necropolis. I love the architecture of death.”
That particular project may have been doomed, but it was just part of her quest to breathe new life into old and discarded materials — decades before upcycling would come to have the caché and understanding it does today. With her fellow student Adam Hills she was skip-diving to rescue furniture, lighting and fixtures cast off from renovations and demolitions, to restore his Victorian flat in Glasgow’s West End. The pair had already developed a business plan to conserve the architectural materials that were routinely being dumped and destroyed with breathtaking gusto across the city.
Their pioneering firm Retrouvius was founded in 1993 — the name is a portmanteau of “retro” and “Vitruvius”, the Roman architect, engineer and author of the 12-volume treatise De architectura.
Over the past three decades, it has become arguably the most high-profile purveyor of — and flag-bearer for — architectural salvage. Today it is both a retail business and an interior design studio, headed up by Speake, that reimagines how reclaimed materials can be used.
Now she has written a book, Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage, bringing together 14 interiors projects — from elegant London town houses to a 16th-century Umbrian farmhouse and a harbourside home in the Hebrides — along with essays that chart the company’s evolution and influence.
Actress Helena Bonham Carter, a client, who wrote the foreword for the book, describes Speake as a “white witch”. Others call her a “house doula” or “shaman” for her ability to reimagine, rebirth and reconfigure architectural spaces.
“I don’t ever believe there’s one solution or two solutions,” says the warm, endlessly inquisitive Speake. “So I quite enjoy the bit where you turn everything on its head again and go, ‘OK, that’s just not working at the moment. Let’s completely have a rethink. Let’s step back.’”
When Speake and Hills started out, their clients were often, like them, restoring homes and needed period pieces — doors, shutters, fireplaces, cast iron baths (they supplied the loo for the infamous scene in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting — sourced from the demolition of a tax office in East Kilbride). Back then, salvaging was about sourcing materials cheaply, but also about conservation and a sense of history — a sentiment that still drives them. “People have always loved the story, the narrative,” says Speake.
One of their earliest big salvage operations was in March 1998 at the Townhead Library in Glasgow. At the start of the 20th century the grand Italianate building was gifted to the city, along with 13 other libraries, by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Back in blissfully red-tape free days, Hills had organised a road closure, hired articulated lorries, employed a team of specialists and a crane and worked through the night to save as much as he could. The following day the building was razed to the ground.
The Retrouvius look that Speake has developed is hard to define — each project is stylistically distinct, but all of them are multi-layered, highly textured, elegant and characterful in their own ways. As Hills says, “when they’re newly finished, they do not look brand new.”
Speake grew up in Oxfordshire with a sharpened appreciation of history and storytelling. Her mother, Birgitte, worked as head of conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum of natural history, while her father, George Speake, an art historian and archaeologist, would take her on childhood visits to country churches and manor houses. When she was 15, a trip to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge — where the merging of old cottages and a new extension provides a backdrop to a collection of furniture, art, and textiles — made her realise she wanted to pursue architecture as a career, playing on those childhood values.
“People always talk about tactility,” adds Speake. “They just want to touch stuff. There’s this material quality; you just want to go ‘what is that?’ Or ‘what have they done on the walls here?’” In her work, materials are spliced, flipped and reconfigured so that it is frequently difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s salvaged and what’s not. Some of her favourite materials are used over and over, but in different ways.
Fossilised Derbyshire limestone is one example — 200 tonnes were lifted from Frederick Gibberd’s 1955 Heathrow Terminal 2 concourse when it was demolished in 2010, and it appears in multiple Retrouvius projects, including an imposing fire surround for designer Bella Freud’s west London flat. Sections of patterned mirror, rescued from the art deco Unilever building on London’s Victoria embankment, were cut and assembled into a glamorous bathroom splashback in another project for Freud.
Fluted terrazzo columns, salvaged from Liverpool department store Lewis’s, are reimagined as a spectacular backdrop in a 1960s St John’s Wood apartment. Speake describes her approach as “a carpet bomb of rich, unusual, rescued materials to build up texture; tactile and sensual; a jewel box of details.”
Retrouvius HQ is spread across two sites in Kensal Green, north London. The pair first bought an old stable here in 1999, but they have expanded through a warren of rooms that now serve as a store-meets-warehouse. Speake’s design studio is just up the road. Hidden behind a row of Victorian terraces and entered through a garage door, the two-storey courtyard studio is built in a patchwork of materials that are densely interwoven in a sort of architectural game of Tetris. There are metal railings from the London School of Economics (with sections reshaped to make them more playful and contemporary); travertine columns sit among warm teak and sapele timber on the exterior walls; rusty panels are fixed with visible bolts; and huge windows (rescued from their children’s primary school) are flipped on their sides.
The playground for experimentation continues inside. In a deeply glamorous shower room, those travertine columns appear again, with a rich green marble floor. But here Speake contrasts both with contemporary wall tiles. “I need to keep it a bit calm,” she says.
There are walls in textural clay, clad in pitch pine reclaimed from old shutters, or covered in rich brown suede salvaged from leather panels in Old Marylebone Town Hall. “We’d had them for years and years, and no one wanted them,” says Speake. One day Hills decided to open them up, revealing a far more alluring suede on the reverse side.
A constant curiosity propels her. “You’ve got to keep learning and responding. With every project, I think ‘what am I going to learn from this? What are we all going to gain from this?’” says Speake. Each project is “a big commitment”, taking “a minimum of two or three years of your life. So that’s why they all look quite distinct; we choose different projects with different challenges. It just makes it more interesting.”
Over the past 10 years the focus on reuse has taken on a new urgency, as we all carefully consider the impact of what we buy and consume. In construction, those concerns are at scale. Even if her entire career has been focused on showing people the potential of discarded materials — which can often be far better quality than anything sourced new — interior design projects still present an ethical conundrum. “Every single one of our projects has to go through a process of stripping out, and there is a moment where I think ‘are we part of the problem as well?’ And you genuinely start to worry about that,” she says. “But at the same time, I do think that change is a human thing.”
She used to describe their work as parasitic, feeding off a world of fragments from the past. “I don’t feel like that anymore,” she admits. “Sometimes it’s difficult to take the reclaimed option, but often it’s surprisingly easy and we try and show that through design. It has always been about encouraging and empowering.”
“Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage: Designing Homes from a Philosophy of Re-use” by Maria Speake (Rizzoli)
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