Century Mansion House, York

摘要

AT TIMES it must seem a thankless job being a conservation architect: you put so much skill and sensitivity into restoring a building to the point where the work is barely visible. York's Grade I listed 1732 Mansion House - the UK's first purpose-built house for a Lord Mayor - has just completed £2.4m and five years' worth of restoration and recuration, courtesy of architecture practice De Matos Ryan, stripping out decades' worth of accretions. But to walk around it you would think the building had always looked much like this.