Retrouvius is Maria Speake and Adam Hills’s combination salvage business and design studio: they lead by example and we’ve been drawing inspiration from them for years. The couple met as architecture students in Glasgow in the early 1990s and, after witnessing many of the city’s historic structures being felled, they found their calling. “We just couldn’t believe we were seeing materials and building components of significant value routinely discarded,” writes Maria.
They’ve since settled in London where they rescue historic elements—materials, furniture, lighting, and fixtures, from Art Deco mirrored paneling to pine planks for curing cheese—and put them to use. While Adam hunts down their offerings, Maria and her team take on design commissions in which they always incorporate resuscitated pieces.
Retrouvius, Maria’s just-published book, is a compendium of these house projects. Clients include Helena Bonham Carter, who penned the foreword (“I remember being in Guy and Natasha Hill’s home and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s what I need, a museum cabinet to cover my dishwasher,” writes Helena by way of explaining how she came to hire Retrouvius). “Our mission has become to enable and inspire re-use, not just as a design preference, but as an attitude,” explains Maria. “Responsibility, resourcefulness, respect, and repair—aren’t these qualities more valuable today than ever?” Here’s a peek.
Photography courtesy of Retrouvius and Rizzoli, from Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage: Designing Homes from a Philosophy of Re-Use, as credited.
Above: Not every room requires a lot: this North London living room retained its original wooden floors and window shutters. Maria cloaked it in Marrakesh pink and added a vintage tapestry to the owner’s own sofa. Photograph by Michael Sinclair.
Above: “We used a palette of limewash paint colors throughout the house, inspired by the local environment: heather, kelp, seaweed, cold-water coral, and lichen,” writes Maria of Rodel House, a 1781 harborside manse in the Outer Hebrides that had been “stripped and denuded” of its history, until Retrouvius arrived. Photograph by Simon Upton.
Above: Richly veined salvaged marble and a band of wooden cigar molds add pattern and texture to the new kitchen of a North London townhouse. “Re-used materials have a tactile personality, carrying memories and feeling that root us in something real,” writes Maria. “The true value of materials and design, however, lies not just in their novelty, but in their capacity to evolve and endure.” Photograph by Michael Sinclair.
Above: Fashion designer Bella Freud, another contributor to the book, commissioned Retrouvius to build her London hideaway. It’s arrayed around a central “courtyard” with a green carpet and features interior steel windows saved from the Battersea Power Station. The slouchy leather armchair belonged to Bella’s father, artist Lucian Freud—that’s his painting cart next to it. Photograph by Michael Sinclair.
Above: Salvage isn’t the only answer for Maria: after failing to source a vintage Pucci rug sized right for an Italian client’s bedroom in Hampstead, she contacted the design house directly. Permission was granted for “a bespoke colorway to be made from an archival Pucci design…a wild mix of funky and punky colors.” The flower-shaped glass ceiling light is a Retrouvius special. Photograph by Tom Fallon.
Above: Checked kente cloth patterns the walls and ceiling of a guest bath with bright wainscotting and layered vintage rugs in a centuries-old house in Dartmoor, England. Photograph by Theo Tennant.
Above: Retrouvius is available from booksellers all over. On the cover: a Notting Hill sitting room with a 17th-century stone fireplace salvaged from a house in Somerset: see the project in A Rustic Townhouse Remodel by London’s Masters of Salvage. Photograph by Kim Lightbody.
More Retrouvius remodels:
