A young family wants to transform a house used as a hotel within a historic town center to suit their ideas of living. Rather than using a pre-defined concept, the conversion seeks strategies and a way of dealing with material and financial resources as well as the existing building fabric. We reject constructive clarity, a binary distinction between new and old and formal coherence. The conversion aims to understand the chronological and constructive layers of the building as simultaneous and perpetuates this through reinterpretations, such as the revaluation of recycled marble window sills as ornament, the vagueness of the static interventions, the distortion and imitation of the existing, the superimposition and merging. Thriftiness is unexpectedly found in generosity – room-high doors save lintels, the interwoven first floor even saves entire doors, the simple flat glazing of an old doorway saves masonry.