Working on Hereford's older buildings
Hereford is a cathedral city with an unusually varied stock of historic buildings. The most distinctive are the timber-framed 'black-and-white' buildings found in the city and throughout Herefordshire's famous black-and-white villages. These buildings need particular care: their infill panels are typically wattle-and-daub or brick nogging finished in lime, and their ceilings and internal partitions are lime plaster on riven timber lath. Alongside the timber frames sit Georgian townhouses of brick and local sandstone, and out in the county the cider-country farmhouses — stone, brick and timber, usually in some combination, and almost always originally finished in lime.
Timber-framed buildings punish rigid modern materials more severely than any other type. A frame moves with the seasons; lime plaster and daub move with it, while cement render and gypsum crack, let water in at the junctions and then hold it against the oak. Trapped moisture at the frame is how sound timber becomes beetle-ridden and rotten. Repairing infill panels means matching what is there — patching daub with daub, replastering lath in haired lime, keeping the panel breathable and slightly flexible. It is specialist work, and it is exactly the work we set the business up to do. The same logic applies to the county's sandstone, which is soft enough that hard cement pointing erodes the stone instead of the joint.
What we do in Hereford
- Lime plastering — haired lime on lath, repairs to wattle-and-daub infill panels, and three-coat work on masonry
- Lime rendering — breathable external finishes for timber-framed and solid-wall buildings
- Lime pointing — soft lime mortars matched to Herefordshire sandstone and old brick
- Limecrete floors — breathable ground floors for farmhouses and cottages with damp solid floors
- Full renovation of period and listed buildings, coordinated as a single project
Listed buildings and conservation areas in Herefordshire
Herefordshire has a wealth of listed buildings — its timber-framed stock in particular is heavily protected — and conservation areas cover the historic centre of Hereford and many of the county's towns and villages. On a listed building, replacing plaster, render, pointing or infill panels will usually need listed building consent, and the expectation is repair in matching traditional materials. That expectation works in your favour: lime repair is better for the building as well as being what the consent requires. We are used to specifying our mixes and methods clearly for applications and for discussions with conservation officers.
Nearby areas we also cover
Beyond the city we cover the black-and-white villages — Weobley, Eardisland, Pembridge, Dilwyn and their neighbours — along with Leominster, Ledbury, Ross-on-Wye, Kington and Hay-on-Wye, and the Golden Valley villages towards the Welsh border.