09/09/2026
A seventeenth-century painted vault. Water damage, soot, decades of decay. The kind of ceiling most people would look at and think: start over.
Nathalie Scipioni didn't. Working on this UNESCO-listed restoration in France, she and her team made a deliberate choice — conserve what remained of the original work, but don't recreate what was lost. Filling in the missing sections to look "original" would have created a false historical record. So the losses stayed visible, and only what could be authentically restored, was.
It's a philosophy she says doesn't always translate to Australia. On one local project, Nathalie was asked to design a newbuilding to visually imitate a traditional bungalow, simply because of its heritage setting — the kind of request that wouldn't happen under the French approach, where new work is expected to honestly read as new, not dressed up as old.
With nearly 30 years across both systems — heritage training at the École de Chaillot in Paris, work on sites including Place Stanislas in Nancy, and major Australian projects including Carriageworks and Sydney Town Hall — Nathalie makes the case that recreating the past isn't the same as respecting it.
Full piece in the comments.
By Nathalie Scipioni | Principal Architect, Nathalie Scipioni Architects
By Nathalie Scipioni | Principal Architect, Nathalie Scipioni Architects Different Histories, Different Approaches to Heritage There is a significant difference in the timeline of heritage conservation between Europe and Australia. European theories of architectural restoration began to be formally
