Joiner in Chester

A great deal of central Chester is listed or in a conservation area, and that changes what can be done and how. Work that people assume is purely internal can still need consent in a listed building, and replacing original joinery with a modern equivalent is usually the wrong answer even where it is permitted.

Our approach is repair and match: splice in rather than replace, run a moulding to match the original rather than buy the closest profile, and ease and rehang a door rather than swap it. We will tell you when we think something needs consent and we will not start until you have checked.

Outside the walls, Hoole and Handbridge are dense Victorian terraces: narrow, deep, with a back addition and a yard. The bedrooms are long and narrow, which rules out most freestanding furniture and makes built-in storage along one wall the only sensible answer.

These houses have usually kept their original stairs and a good deal of their trim, so there is matching work alongside the fitted work.

Chester's commercial joinery is mostly retail and office inside and just outside the walls. The constraint is always access: restricted vehicle hours in the centre, short loading windows, and buildings that were never designed to take three-metre lengths up a staircase.

We work that out at the pricing stage rather than discovering it with a lorry on the street. It is about an hour from us, which is comfortably inside the range we cover for commercial work.

The one thing Chester adds that nowhere else we work does is the Rows: buildings with two levels of frontage, where the shop you are fitting out may be reached along a covered walkway at first floor with no vehicle access at all. Everything goes in by hand along the Row, which has to be understood before a price is given rather than after, and it is the reason a Chester retail fit-out is not priced like a Birkenhead one.