For 90 years the top floor of 14 Tide Street was where the Ruiz family dried and mended their nets. When Ana and Kofi Brandt bought it in 2022, the floor was still covered in tar, and the roof had a hole you could stand up in.
They are both architects, and they decided early on to change as little as possible. The beams stayed. The brick stayed, cleaned but not painted. The big loading door, where the nets were winched up from the street, became a window that fills the main room with light.
Living in one room
The ground floor is now two small bedrooms. The whole of the loft is one room: kitchen, table, sofa and a wood stove. “We wanted to live the way the loft was built,” Ana said. “One big space, and everything in it working.”
On a warm day you can still smell the tar in the floorboards. We hoped it would fade. Now we hope it never does.
Kofi Brandt
The Brandts kept the Ruiz family’s old net needles and hung them by the door. Marta Ruiz, who still fishes from the quay, came to see the finished house in the summer. “She stood in the middle of the room and cried a bit,” Ana said. “Then she told us the stove was in the wrong place.”
