It gets into your bones.
When Cheng Smart's brother handed her the keys to one of the city's historic buildings with the instruction to "make something with it", it was not immediate excitement that she felt.
The immunologist and scientist had no experience with a building like that - did not know what to do with it - and had about as much information to go on.
Then, they bought a second one.
The first, a former nurses' home in the East End, would become the Essendon apartment building.
The second, for which she feels now the ineffable connection a mother feels for her child, was the T&G Mutual Life Assurance building on Hunter Street.
The T&G was sold around 1995 to Dr Smart's brother for, she estimates, about $900,000.
In the years since, she has poured more than $2.5 million into upkeep and preservation of the building already dripping in Art Deco heritage with a storied past.
Dr Smart's brother had co-founded his Malaysian engineering firm. He was at least familiar with buildings and the way they worked. Dr Smart was a scientist.
She knew that she would need support.
The adage goes it takes a village to raise a child. It would take no less to preserve and maintain the village's history.
"I was lucky to have a whole team of consultants, engineers, architects and so on," she said.
"And, very importantly, I got a project manager - a Maltese person and a friend now - who helps us. And an amazing heritage architect who was talking about retiring, but I told him he cannot retire."
"Cheng doesn't let anyone retire," Dr Smart's partner in the building's management, Helena Hannan, said. "They say they're retired, but not for Cheng."
Dr Smart may not have envisioned herself as a custodian of the city's heritage, but over the years that is exactly what she has become.
The building has become her legacy. She wants to keep it. She wants to care for it, and to make it comfortable and safe, and she wants it to be preserved.
"It is just the commitment you have to the building," she said. "I'm very committed to this. I want to keep the T&G Building as nice as it can be."
The first five levels were built in 1923 as the headquarters for shipping agents McIlwraith and McEacharn on the corner of Hunter and Watt streets.
According to state records, there were up to 12 agents working on Watt Street, collectively known as the Watt Street Admirals.
The view from Scottish House in those days was an uninterrupted expanse of open land stretching to the Newcastle harbour.
From the top of the now-seven-storey building last week, as a ship sailed under tug towards the heads, Dr Smart pointed to one of the surrounding buildings in the heart of the city.
"You can see through," she said of a gap made in the space where balconies connected one building to another.
When T&G bought the building and added the tower in 1937, it became one of the city's tallest.
Access to the tower is through a ladder and manhole, opening to a rarely seen view of the harbor, Fort Scratchley, and Christ Church Cathedral.
Last month, the state government granted a site-specific exemption from NSW Heritage laws to allow for minor maintenance works to be completed inside the building. The building was added to the state's heritage register in 1999.
The exemption allows for the removal, replacement, or alteration of non-significant internal elements and fit-outs within suites, offices, retail, and commercial spaces.
Once the largest mid-century office block in the city, the building is now populated by an eclectic mix of professional tenants. As she returned to the meeting room on the third floor, where she and Ms Hannan keep their offices, Dr Smart's husband - Emeritus Professor Tim Roberts - was extracting DNA from strawberries in a makeshift experiment with methylated spirits.
Dr Roberts broke ground in 2014 when he and a team of researchers discovered a method for quantifying the loss of amino acids through sweat in athletes. He later founded the biotechnology company InnovAAte, which now has its office down the hall.
Psychologists and architects populate the tenants board in the foyer, alongside lawyers who, Dr Smart said, favoured the former insurance company building for its historic safes that still populate the floors.
"There is never going to be another one like it," Ms Hannan said. "It draws you in, and you just need to take care of it."
Dr Smart, as she recites the list of tradespeople and tenants who have come and gone over the years, and who remain, paused on an arcane point. She was supposed to open the building every morning between 7am and 7.15am, she said.
Now, there are two tenants who arrive before Dr Smart - only two - and whoever is first opens the doors. Dr Smart or Ms Hannan is there by 7.15am.
"It just shows that they are very helpful," Dr Smart said. "They identify themselves with the building. They know that we keep the building maintained."
"You just have to."
