About us

A Mason, an Engineer and Twenty Years of Old Walls

The practice was formed by a stonemason trained in traditional lime work and a structural engineer who spent a decade assessing damaged rural buildings after earthquakes. They met arguing about a vault: the engineer wanted to remove it, the mason knew it had stood for two centuries and understood why. The vault is still there, and the working method that came out of that argument — understand the structure before touching it — is what the practice now sells.

Most of our work begins with a building somebody has just bought and does not understand. There are cracks that have not moved since the nineteenth century and hairline ones that opened last winter, and telling them apart is worth more than any amount of scaffolding. We survey, we measure, we open small areas to see how the wall is actually built, and only then do we say what genuinely needs doing. Frequently that is less than the owner feared and different from what they expected.

Our masons are trained in the old techniques because the buildings demand them: lime putty mortars slaked and matured properly, stone dressed by hand to match what surrounds it, dry stone laid so it drains, vaults centred on timber formwork the way they were originally built. We also employ a specialist who does nothing but rock-cut interiors, where the material is soft, unpredictable, and unforgiving of power tools.