Walk up Avenue Road from Torre station and count the original sashes. You will not need many fingers. The railway brought this suburb into being after 1848, and most of what went up was rendered stone with hipped slate roofs and painted timber windows. Since then a good share has gone to white plastic, and Torbay Council's appraisal for the Torre conservation area says so plainly. We make replacement sashes, casements and front doors in timber for the houses that still have the openings and the boxes. Where the old window is sound underneath the flaking paint, we repair it instead and tell you so.
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
Walk up Avenue Road from Torre station and you won't count many original sashes. What's left, and what replaces the rest, matters to the conservation area.
Luke has been around joinery all his life, from a child, and it's the family trade. Making a box sash or a four-panel front door the way it ought to look comes from experience. Luke and the team build them in Barton.
Torre
The Cary heir began laying out building land on the Torre Abbey estate in 1849, and by 1900 the suburb was almost complete. Most fronts were kept plain: sliding sashes in a rendered wall and a panelled door, often under a small fanlight. Some of the larger Avenue Road villas were given floor-length three-part windows with shutters folding into the reveals, put in for the visitors who rented them. Those openings are the hardest to copy, because the frames are tall, the meeting rails sit low and the glass is heavy. They are also the ones that look worst when somebody fits a plastic copy with fat sections.
Most of our window enquiries in Torre come from the terraces off Bampfylde Road and Vansittart Road, and from flats inside converted villas, where a leaseholder wants one bay put back the way it was. Flats are where the paperwork tends to get harder, which we come to in the questions below. Indoors, the same houses tend to have tall, narrow bedrooms with a chimney breast in the middle of one wall, and we cover that on our page about fitted wardrobes in Torre.
The Case For It
Victorian glazing bars are slender, and a stock bar is nearly always fatter. We copy the section from your own window, so the new frame reads as old from across the street.
Some Torre sashes have horns below the meeting rail and some do not, depending on when and by whom they were made. We look at what your elevation has and repeat it instead of guessing.
If the pulley stiles and weight pockets are sound we keep them and re-hang new sashes on fresh cord. That leaves the box frame, and the plaster round it, undisturbed.
Four-panel and six-panel front doors made to the proportions of the opening, with the fanlight glazed to the pattern above it. Letter plates and knockers fitted where you want them.
Houses close to the railway hear every train. Slim double-glazed units, where they are allowed, and brush seals in the staff beads take the edge off the noise without adding bulk to the frame.
If the reveals still have their empty shutter cases, we can make the folding leaves to go back in at the same time as the window, so both are painted together and close cleanly.
Before You Choose
Start by asking the maker to look at the box as well as the sash. On an 1850s or 1860s Torre house the outer frame is often in better condition than the moving parts. A firm that only quotes for complete new units, frame and all, is pricing the job that suits its workshop rather than the one your house needs.
Next, ask how the new section will be worked out. The answer you want is that someone will measure your glazing bars, meeting rails and the sill nose with a profile gauge, then draw them full size. If the reply is a brochure with three standard sashes in it, expect the result to look slightly wrong, the way plastic copies on the neighbouring street already do.
Finally, ask who is checking the planning position and when. In Torre the answer changes depending on whether you own a whole house or a flat in a split villa, and whether the building is listed. We would rather you rang Torbay Council's planning service before paying a deposit to anyone, ourselves included.
Compared
Owners in Torre usually weigh up four routes for a worn sash. These are the trade-offs as we see them on the rendered houses around Torre station.
| Repair the old sash | New timber sash | Secondary glazing | uPVC replacement | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What happens to the original | Kept and mended | Copied, then replaced | Kept, with a panel inside | Removed entirely |
| Sightlines from Avenue Road | Unchanged | Matched to the old bars | Unchanged outside | Thicker frames show |
| Heat and train noise | Better with draught strips | Good with slim units | Very good | Good |
| Fit with the conservation appraisal | Encouraged | Usually welcomed | Rarely an issue | The change it criticises |
| Future upkeep | Paint every few years | Paint every few years | Clean the inner pane | Cannot be repainted |
| Rough cost per opening | From a few hundred pounds | £1,400 upwards | Below a new sash | Lowest at first |
Our Process
Every window job follows these seven stages. In Torre the planning check usually sits between the first and second, because a flat and a house can get very different answers.
We look at each window from inside and out, test the sashes for movement, probe the cill and the bottom rails for soft timber and measure the box. Then we tell you window by window which can be repaired.
Glazing bars, meeting rails, horns and mouldings are traced off your existing frames and drawn full size. You see the elevation with real dimensions before you commit to anything.
We tell you whether we think permission or listed building consent is likely, and give you the drawings to send to the council. Nothing gets cut until that question has an answer.
Torre is set back from the sea, so engineered softwood suits most elevations here. Where a window takes the full south-westerly weather we will suggest accoya and explain the difference in price.
Sashes, frames and doors are machined, jointed and given their primer and top coats in the workshop, on every face including the edges you never see.
Old sashes come out and new ones go in on the same day, so no room is left boarded overnight. On a terrace with tight parking we bring one opening's worth of joinery at a time.
Each sash is weighted to stay where you leave it. We return after the first winter to ease anything that has swollen and touch up the paint at the beads.
Reassurance
Budget
£1,400 – £9,000
per opening, made and fitted
Window costs here follow the opening, not the house. A small casement on a back extension sits at the bottom of the range. A floor-length three-part window on an Avenue Road villa, with new shutters, sits near the top. We price each opening separately, so you can do the front first and the back next year. Our timber windows and doors page explains the timbers and finishes.
Guide range only, VAT included. Your figure comes from the measured visit and the drawing you sign off.
What moves the priceSplicing a new bottom rail and re-cording a sash costs a fraction of a new one. Once the box frame has gone soft as well, a full replacement is usually the better value.
Upper sashes on the terraces off Avenue Road and Tor Park Road often need a tower scaffold, and parking near the station is tight. Both go into the quote as separate lines.
Working on one flat's windows inside a split villa can mean the freeholder's sign-off and a shared stair to carry frames up. It adds time rather than material, and we price it honestly.
Questions
Feedback
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.”
Local
Torre's best buildings are worth a look before you decide what to do with your own front. A chapel, a park and a Pearson church are all within a short walk of the station.
Climb Chapel Hill to the medieval chapel on its limestone outcrop. Inside, the floor is still bare rock, and from the top you can see how Torre's streets fan out below.
Learn more about St Michael's Chapel, Chapel Hill on Google Maps
Upton Park was a tip before the council laid it out in the late 1920s. Today it has a bowling green, mature trees and play areas from a 2021 refurbishment.
Learn more about Upton Park on Google Maps
J L Pearson designed All Saints in the 1880s, and the tower was left unfinished. Agatha Christie was christened here in 1890.
Learn more about All Saints Church, Bampfylde Road on Google MapsCoverage
Torre is a few minutes from our usual routes across Torquay. We cover every district below, and towns further out across Teignbridge and the South Hams.
A picture of the elevation and a close-up of the worst cill is enough to start. We will tell you whether it looks like repair or replacement, then come and survey it properly.
