Unsure of what to do in Mumbai this weekend? Here’s an idea: Take a trip to the city’s south, the plush neighbourhood of Ballard Estate in particular.

On Calicut Road, there is a two-storeyed architectural marvel, the IF.BE. An ice factory in 1878, the revamped space now sees creative minds discuss art and ideas.

Kamal Malik — an architect with almost five decades of experience — shares the journey of restoring the almost 150-year-old building.

He informs that it was the erstwhile Ambico Ice Factory that met most of South Mumbai’s ice demands.

Today, IF.BE is a 10,000-square-foot space that boasts five sections — ‘The Banyan Tree Café’, ‘The Substation’, which is a reading room and shop for architectural instruments and books, the ‘Ice Factory’ designed for performances, ‘The Cathedral’ where the bulk of exhibitions take place, and the fine dining Indian restaurant, Native Bombay, where guests fuel up.

Thirty months of “painstaking efforts” were directed towards the restoration and Malik says touches of sustainability were included in every way possible.

For months, the team scraped away at old plaster, which yielded brickwork and vintage Burma teak woodwork underneath.

No attempts were made to polish the teak wood surfaces. This lends a rugged, raw touch to the staircase at Native Bombay.

In places where necessary, safety upgrades were made. These include structural reinforcements to the walls and roof.

The parts that took the most amount of brainstorming, Malik shares, were the main ice factory, sub-station, cold storage, and the ice-cubing area. “These required intensive examination and surgical intervention through retrofits to stabilise crumbling, warped, and leaking walls, sagging roofs and trusses,” Malik informs.

Right since the nascent stages of the project, Malik says repurposing was key. “It was 80 percent adaptive restoration and 20 percent architectural intervention.”

“We discovered that the brickwork that lay under the plaster was a composite brick and wood combination. This gave stability to the walls. It also took care of the seismic aspects,” Malik shares.

“We restored the wood and the brick. The only new material that we bought on site was a very small quantity of lightweight steel.”