Most of the bespoke joinery we make for St Marychurch ends up either facing the precinct or tucked into a little stone terrace a street or two away from it. Fore Street is still the largest local shopping centre in Torquay outside the town itself, and most of its units are independents. Shopkeepers here want a front that pulls people in off the paving, shelving that holds the stock without crowding the floor, and a counter that does not fall apart after three winters. Behind the shops, the quarry workers' cottages and mid-Victorian terraces need sashes and panelled doors put back the way they were. We do both, from one workshop in Barton.
Tell us roughly what you have in mind and we will arrange a time to come and measure. A photo of the space on your phone is usually enough to start with.
The Joiner Behind It
St Marychurch mixes independent shops along Fore Street with stone terraces a street or two behind. For one, joinery means counters and display. For the other, period windows and doors.
Luke covers both because he's done joinery since childhood, and the trade runs in his family. What he knows comes from doing rather than from a course, and he and the team bring it to shopfronts and homes alike.
About St Marychurch
St Marychurch was a parish in its own right long before Torquay was a resort. It appears in Domesday, and the lanes running off Fore Street and Babbacombe Road follow a medieval pattern. Its growth came from stone. From the late eighteenth century quarries between Barton and Petitor were cutting local limestone, the polished varieties were sold as Devon marble, and skilled masons came over from Ashburton to work in yards on the seaward side of Fore Street. By the 1880s it had its own urban district council and a town hall, and it only joined the Borough of Torquay in 1900. The former town hall still stands at the corner of Manor Road, built in the same grey stone the quarries produced.
That history is still written on the houses. North of the centre, around Park Road, Western Road, Compton Place and Lummaton Place, rows of modest two-storey terraces went up between about 1850 and 1880 for quarrymen, marble polishers and, later, workers at the Watcombe terracotta works. They are plain buildings, rendered over stone, with small sash windows and four-panel doors. Torbay Council's appraisal of the St Marychurch conservation area is blunt about how many have lost their original joinery to plastic, and how much better the ones that kept it look. We agree with every word of that section, which is not something we often say about a planning document.
Services In St Marychurch
Shop work and house work, in roughly equal measure. The precinct keeps us busy with fronts and fittings, and the terraces behind it bring a steady run of windows, doors and the alcove shelving that small Victorian front rooms need.
Timber shopfronts with stallrisers, pilasters and a proper fascia, plus counters, wall shelving and window display stands. We draw the front to suit the building above it, which is what the 1880s shops on Fore Street were designed around.
Read more about Commercial Joinery & Shopfitting
Sliding sashes and four-panel front doors for the quarry workers' terraces, copied from survivors in the same row. In this part of Torquay that often means a single horizontal glazing bar in each sash, which off-the-shelf windows never get right.
Read more about Timber Windows & Doors
Front rooms in these terraces are small and the chimney breast takes a big bite out of them. Alcove cupboards and shelves either side recover the space, and a desk built into one recess turns a corner into somewhere to work.
Read more about Alcove Units & Home OfficesWhy It Matters Here
Many Fore Street shops kept their upper floors, cornices and console brackets but lost the ground-floor front. We design the new one to line up with what survives above it, so the building reads as one piece again.
Plenty of shops here are deep and narrow. We plan counters, shelving and display around the floor plan, keeping a clear path from door to till and putting storage under the counter where customers never see it.
A shopfront can be prepared in the workshop and fitted over a short closure, often a Sunday and Monday. We board up neatly while the old front comes out, so you are never left open to the street overnight.
Western Road and Park Road still have original sashes in some houses. We measure those sections and glazing bars and reproduce them, so a new window sits alongside the neighbours rather than standing out.
Thick stone walls give deep reveals and uneven openings. We make each door and frame to the opening we measure, with linings scribed to the stone rather than packed out with filler.
These were built as workers' cottages, not villas. Fitted joinery lets a two-up two-down hold a modern household's belongings without freestanding furniture eating the floor.
From The Workshop
This retail fit-out came out of our workshop: a full wall of timber shelving divided into bays for stock, with a long timber-topped counter running in front of it. It is the sort of fitting an independent shop needs, sized to the room and the product rather than picked from a shopfitter's catalogue. The shelves are set at heights that keep the best sellers between knee and eye level, and the counter top is thick enough to take years of bags being dropped on it.
For businesses in St Marychurch, that matters because so many units on Fore Street are narrow and oddly shaped. A counter drawn to your floor plan leaves space to move, and timber can be repaired or refinished when a busy summer has scuffed it. Laminate fittings cannot. When the shop changes hands, a good timber counter is often one of the things the new owner asks to keep.
Reassurance
Our Process
Shop and house jobs follow the same seven steps. For a shop, we also fix the fitting date early so you can tell customers and plan stock around it.
For a shop, we visit before opening or after closing and measure the front, the floor and the services: where the power, alarm and card machine run. We photograph the upper storeys too, since a new shopfront has to sit under them. For a terraced house we check the reveals in the stone, any surviving sashes or doors further along the row, and how the timber we are replacing has failed.
You get a drawn elevation and a plan, with real dimensions on them, before anything is priced as final. Door swings, drawer positions, where the sockets end up. It is much cheaper to move a shelf on paper than after it has been cut.
We agree the species and the grade, and where it matters we pick the actual boards. Oak with heavy medullary rays looks completely different from quarter-sawn stock. The quote names the timber, the finish and the ironmongery, so you are comparing like with like against anyone else you ask.
The timber sits in the workshop and settles towards the moisture content it will live at. BS EN 942 puts joinery for a house heated to between 12 and 21 degrees at 9 to 13 per cent. Skip this and the piece will do its moving after it is installed, in your hallway, rather than on our racks.
Cut, moulded and jointed, then dry-assembled on the bench so we find out about any problem while it is still in our building. Carcasses go together, doors are hung, drawers are fitted and adjusted. Nothing is finished until it has been put together at least once.
Sprayed, oiled or hand-painted in the workshop, including the backs and the edges you will never see. Sealing five faces and leaving the sixth bare is how a panel takes up moisture unevenly and bows. Finishing off site also means no spray dust through your house.
Shopfronts arrive finished and go in over the shortest closure we can manage, with the old front removed, the opening made good and the new one glazed the same day where possible. Inside a terrace, windows go in one room at a time. We return after the first winter to ease sashes and doors, since timber in a solid stone wall settles once the heating has run for a few months.
Local
St Marychurch has a lot packed into a small area. All three of these are within a walk of the precinct, and one of them is right in the middle of it.
A three-floor museum in Fore Street, inside the former Tudor Cinema, which was built with the row of 1930s shops around it. The Cuming family started it in 1987 from a collection of railway relics. Inside there is a full-size Victorian street with shops and a forge, a model railway and a First World War trench.
Learn more about Bygones on Google Maps
The cliff railway opened on 1 April 1926 and runs about 720 feet down the wooded slope to Oddicombe Beach, at a gradient of roughly 1 in 2.8. It shut during the war and reopened in 1951. At the bottom is a long beach of shingle and sand under red cliffs, with cafés and beach huts along the back.
Learn more about Babbacombe Cliff Railway and Oddicombe Beach on Google Maps
There has been a church on this hilltop since Saxon times. On 30 May 1943 a German fighter-bomber hit it during Sunday school, killing 21 children and three teachers. It was rebuilt in grey local limestone between 1952 and 1956. The carved Norman font survived, and Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter is buried near the lychgate.
Learn more about St Mary the Virgin parish church on Google MapsFeedback
Rated 5 out of 5
“Our bedroom is in one of the old Warberries villas and the back wall bows by about an inch and a half across four metres. Two national firms measured it, quoted, then went quiet. These came, measured, and said it needed scribing rather than filling. The wardrobes go right into the corner and there is no gap anywhere. My husband keeps running his hand down the join.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“We run a bar on the harbourside and needed the counter and back fittings replaced without losing a summer weekend. They built the lot off site, came in on a Sunday night and had us trading by Tuesday lunchtime. Knowing the whole thing was made before they ever shut our doors is what sold it.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“Sash windows on the front elevation, and we are in a conservation area so it had to be timber and it had to match. They took a profile off the original, made new boxes in accoya, and the planning side went through without a query. From the pavement you genuinely cannot tell which is which.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“Two alcoves either side of the chimney, and they turned out to be 40mm different in width, which explains why the flat-pack ones we tried first never sat right. Made as a pair but to two different sets of measurements. Small thing, but it is the difference between looking fitted and looking bought.”
Rated 5 out of 5
“We let our place out over the season so everything gets hammered. I asked them to over-specify the drawer runners and they did, and told me exactly which ones so I can order spares. Three summers in, nothing has sagged. The last kitchen we had did not last two.”
Budget
A shopfront is priced on its width, the number of glazed panels, whether the door is recessed, and how much moulding goes into the fascia and pilasters. Removing an aluminium front and making good the opening adds a day or more. In the precinct there is no stopping outside, so we plan deliveries from the nearest access point and allow for carrying. House work in the terraces is simpler to reach but every opening is a different size, so each sash is made individually. Our timber windows and doors page gives typical figures per window.
Guide ranges only, VAT included. Your figure comes from the measured visit and the drawing you sign off.
What moves the priceQuestions
Coverage
Most of our work sits inside Torbay, because fitted joinery needs at least two visits and often three. Further out we go as far as the drive stays sensible - Newton Abbot and Totnes are routine, and we have taken work down to the South Hams when the job justified it.
Shopfront, counter or sash window, the first step is the same. We come out, measure up and give you a fixed written price, with drawings you can take to the council if it needs consent.
