Cabins, extensions and country homes — Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches
Twelve buildings a year, drawn and framed by the same eight people. No subcontracted carcassing, no value engineering in month nine, and a price we work out before you have paid us anything.
Bramble Hut, Golden Valley — larch on screw piles, 26 m²
What it is made of
What we build
Almost everything that leaves the workshop is one of these three. The plan changes with the site, the family and the budget. The frame, the detailing and the standard of finish do not.
One
14–40 m² · from £64,000
A single warm room with a good window and somewhere to put the kettle. We build them as studios, guest rooms, treatment rooms and holiday lets — craned in whole where the lane allows, framed on site where it doesn't.
Two
20–90 m² · from £145,000
The commonest letter we get describes a cold back kitchen facing the wrong way. We take the back off the house, put the light where it should have been, and make the join look like it was always meant to be there.
Three
120–320 m² · from £520,000
Whole houses, usually on land a family already owns: a paddock corner, a barn footprint, forty years of nettles and a certificate of lawful use. Two years from the first walk to the keys.
How we work
Most of what goes wrong on a building goes wrong before anyone lifts a tool. So we spend an unfashionable amount of time at the start, and we tell you what each stage costs before it begins.
We come and spend a morning on the site with you: where the wind comes from, where the sun lands in February, which trees are staying. You get our honest read, including whether you should build at all.
A short document with two or three ways the building could go, an outline of what the planners will think, and a cost range we are willing to be held to. Roughly a third of these end in us saying no.
Drawings, a physical model at 1:50, and samples of every material you will touch. We meet four times. Nothing goes to planning until you have stood in the room with tape on the floor.
We write the application, argue it, and answer the parish. Ninety-one of our last hundred went through first time; the nine that didn't went through on appeal or amendment, and we absorbed the fee.
Cut in the workshop, raised on site by the people who cut it. You get a photograph every Friday and a call every other Monday, whether or not there is anything to report.
A folder with every drawing, every product and every guarantee. Then we come back at one year, five years and ten to look at the joints, adjust the doors and put right anything the building has decided to do.
186
91%
10 yr
Recent work
Six of the last twenty-two. Every one of these owners has agreed to take a phone call from you, which is the only reference we think is worth anything.
Hover a project for the detail
Twenty-six square metres of larch on screw piles, craned over a hedge in one piece on a Tuesday morning. Ten weeks from ground to kettle.
Golden Valley, Herefordshire2025
A cold north-facing scullery replaced by thirty-four square metres of oak-framed kitchen, with a rooflight the whole length of the room.
Weobley2025
Two hundred and twelve square metres on the footprint of a collapsed Dutch barn. Wood-fibre throughout, air-source heat, and a chimney that actually draws.
Clun Valley, Shropshire2024
A painter's studio at the top of a steep garden. North light, a small burner, and a floor that does not mind turpentine.
Hay-on-Wye2024
Three linked volumes stepping down the slope, so the house never shows more than one storey to the lane it sits above.
Presteigne, Powys2024
Two rooms and a porch at three hundred and eighty metres, built to be shut for the winter and opened in March with nothing to put right.
Black Mountains2023
They were the only people who told us what the thing would actually cost before we had paid them a penny. Two years on, the number on the final invoice is the number from the first letter.
Enquire
We take twelve buildings a year and we book about nine months ahead. The more you can tell us now, the more useful the first reply will be — and if we are not the right people for it, we will say so and name two who might be.
Would rather talk? The workshop answers Monday to Thursday, 8am to 5pm. 01432 555 0119