Six jobs, and what each one made us solve

Every one of these was built on a block that argued back. That is not a coincidence — it is most of what we do.

Three are new houses, two are whole-house renovations of period homes, and one is a real estate agency’s office fitted out against a leasing deadline. Two of the sites were subdivided out of somebody else’s garden. One had to be built boundary to boundary with a roof that spans the full width and no posts in the middle. One needed bridging platforms over the neighbours’ roofs before it could be rendered and painted. On another, the original sandstone had to be restored back to its own jointing, and hundred-year-old floor levels matched to new ones.

They also share the things that do not photograph. Every one ran with its own bank account, its own written monthly report, and a site the owners could walk onto whenever they liked. Most were built alongside an architect, working from a specification we priced exactly as drawn.

The photography here is the finished work. We are digging the before-and-during photographs out of twenty years of job folders, because the middle of a build says more about a builder than the end of one does.