Dezeen promotion: in this short film released by Danish tap manufacturer Vola, architecture practice McLaren Excell explains the importance of paying tribute to a building's past during its restoration process.
The film, titled A Sustained History, sees the two co-directors of McLaren Excell talk through the process of sensitively transforming an 18th-century mill in Wiltshire, England, into a home.
Instead of carrying out a complete overhaul of the building, the London-based practice worked to "tease new life" out of the existing spaces and leave its historic elements uncompromised.

"Without context, without a story, there's a lack of richness and texture to the building. No building is an island; because that's very uninteresting ? not just to us, but to other people," said Luke McLaren and Robert Excell in the film. "People like stories, people like histories, people like a narrative that they can understand. And I think there's a sort of vicarious enjoyment of seeing something go through a process."

The film takes viewers on an intimate tour through the home, where the practice has preserved several of its aged wooden ceiling beams and crumbling brick walls.
Original machinery from the mill has either been left in-situ or fronted by glass panes, much like artefacts in a museum.

A selection of "distinctive but not indulgent" materials have been used for any new interventions so that inhabitants aren't distracted from the buildin...