Our bespoke joinery work in the Warberries is mostly inside flats. The villas on Warberry Hill were built in the 1840s and 1850s for one wealthy household and its servants, and a great many have since been divided into flats - six in one case, eleven in another. That leaves odd rooms: a bedroom that was half of a drawing room, a kitchen squeezed into a dressing room, a shared staircase that still has its original handrail and a cupboard under it that nobody owns. We build storage that makes a small flat work, repair and match communal joinery for freeholders and residents' companies, and we will tell you plainly where a fire-rated doorset is needed instead of a handsome copy of an old door. Landlords, leaseholders and managing agents all call us.
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
So many Warberries villas have been split into flats that odd rooms are normal. Half a bay in a bedroom. A kitchen squeezed into what used to be a dressing room. A stair cupboard nobody can reach.
Rooms like that need someone who can improvise properly. Luke has done joinery all his life, from childhood, and it's a family trade. He and the team design storage and stair joinery for whatever shape the flat was left in.
About The Warberries
Warberry Hill rises to about 136 metres, the highest ground in urban Torquay, and its south-facing slope was opened up in the late 1830s and 1840s by William Kitson, who ran the Palk estate. He laid the roads out in tiers that follow the contours - Lower, Middle and Higher Warberry Roads - and the Harvey brothers built Italianate villas along them on 99-year leases. By the early 1860s more than eighty villas stood on Palk land here. Most stood behind high walls in big gardens, many with a coach house, and stepped footpaths still link one road to the next.
The twentieth century was hard on them. Torbay Council's own appraisal of the area records that between a quarter and a third of the villas built by 1880 have been demolished, many replaced by tall blocks such as Ellesmere and Teneriffe on Lower Warberry Road. Plenty of the survivors were divided instead: the 1844 Villa Maggiore, now Bramhope, became flats in the 1950s yet kept its central stair hall, doors and doorcases. The appraisal names the loss of original doors and sashes as the biggest remaining threat. Our post on joinery in listed buildings and conservation areas explains what that means if you want to change yours.
Services In The Warberries
A converted villa gives you tall ceilings and awkward floor plans in the same flat. These three services cover most of what Warberries owners, tenants and freeholders ask us for, from a single wardrobe to work on the common parts.
Bedrooms made by splitting a grand room often have a chimney breast on one wall and a stud partition on another. We build wardrobes to full ceiling height, which in these villas can mean an extra metre of storage above a standard unit.
Read more about Fitted Wardrobes
In a one-bedroom flat the living room has to be the study too. We fit desks and shelving into the recesses either side of the old fireplace, so the working corner takes no floor space and the room still feels like a sitting room.
Read more about Alcove Units & Home Offices
Shared stairs in the converted villas usually keep their original handrails and balusters, and they take a lot of wear. We repair broken spindles and replace damaged lengths of handrail to the existing profile, so the stair still looks like one piece.
Read more about StaircasesWhy It Matters Here
Principal rooms in these villas are tall, often three metres or more, but many are narrow after subdivision. We take cupboards, shelving and wardrobes right up to the cornice, with a step or rail for the top section, so a small flat stores what a larger one would.
A front door onto a shared hall or stair is expected to resist fire and smoke for thirty minutes and close itself. That rating belongs to a tested doorset, not to the look of a door, and we will say so before you spend money.
Common parts belong to the freeholder or the residents' company, not one flat. We quote in a way that can go to a meeting or a managing agent: itemised, with drawings, and with the timber and finish named for each part.
Converted Warberries villas sometimes keep their stair halls, panelled doors and moulded doorcases. Where they do, we repair them and copy what is missing. That is usually cheaper than people expect and keeps the building's character on the shared side.
Other residents are living around the job. Everything is made and finished in our workshop, so on site it is assembly and fixing only. No saws on the landing, no spray, and far less time on the stairs.
Getting a big wardrobe up a winding shared stair to a second-floor flat is often impossible. We design pieces to come in as sections and assemble in the room, so the size of the staircase does not decide the size of your storage.
From The Workshop
This close-up is the corner of a wardrobe door in pale oak: a solid timber frame with the edge lipped in the same species, so the grain runs round the corner and there is no veneer edge to chip. It is a small detail, but it is the part of a door that gets knocked by every bag and hoover going past.
In a Warberries flat, where a wardrobe often stands in a room that is also a corridor to the bathroom, a tough edge is worth more than a perfect face. Solid edges can be sanded and refinished years later, which a vinyl-wrapped door cannot. It also means the doors come up well after a tenancy changes over.
Reassurance
Our Process
The usual seven stages, with one difference in a shared building: we find out early who owns what. A wardrobe in your bedroom is your decision; a handrail on the common stair is the freeholder's.
We measure the room, then check how the pieces will get to it - stair widths, turns, the height of the landing window. In a converted villa we ask whether the walls are original masonry or later partitions, because that decides the fixings. For shared areas we note which parts are communal so the quote can be split between the flat and the freeholder if needed.
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.
Sections are carried up and assembled in the room, which keeps the shared stair clear for other residents. We agree a fitting day with the managing agent where there is one, protect the common carpets and banisters, and leave the hall as we found it. We call back in the spring, after a season of heating, to ease any door that has moved.
Local
The Warberries slope straight down to the harbour, so most of central Torquay is a walk away. These three are each about ten or fifteen minutes on foot downhill.
Run by the Torquay Natural History Society, founded in 1844, in a Grade II listed building on Babbacombe Road dating from 1874 to 1876. The galleries cover finds from Kents Cavern, Egyptology, local natural history and an old Devon farmhouse, and there is a whole gallery given over to Agatha Christie and her life in the town.
Learn more about Torquay Museum on Google Maps
A cliff garden of zigzag paths built into the face of Waldon Hill above the seafront, planted with palms and exotics. The sheer limestone face behind it follows the line of the Sticklepath Fault. A three-year restoration finished in 2010 and added carved stone sculptures, and the viewing points look across the marina and Torre Abbey Sands.
Learn more about Rock Walk (Royal Terrace Gardens) on Google Maps
The harbour was the Palk family's project, begun after an Act of Parliament in 1803 and finished once the Napoleonic Wars were over. Princess Louise laid the foundation stone for Princess Pier in 1890, and its long timber deck is still the best place to walk out and look back at the villas stacked up the Warberries slope.
Learn more about Torquay Harbour And Princess Pier 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
Three things move Warberries prices more than anything else. The first is access: a second-floor flat up a shared stair with no lift adds labour, and very large pieces have to be made in sections. The second is height, because building to a three-metre ceiling uses more timber than a standard run. The third is who is paying - work on common parts often needs an itemised quote that a freeholder or residents' company can approve. Parking on the narrow upper roads can be tight, so we plan deliveries in advance. Typical ranges are on the fitted wardrobes page.
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.
Send us the room size, the floor you are on and what needs storing, and we will arrange a visit. If the work involves the common parts, tell us who manages the building and we will price it in a way they can sign off.
