In Torre, a surprising share of the bespoke joinery we're asked for is built around chimney breasts. The streets either side of Avenue Road and Tor Park Road went up fast after the railway arrived in 1848, mostly as stuccoed semis, small villas and two-storey terraces, and they were all built to be heated by open fires. That left two alcoves in almost every front room and often in the bedrooms too. Fill them properly and a narrow Torre house gains more storage than any freestanding cabinet will give it. We build cupboards below and shelves above, scribed to plaster that has had a hundred and fifty years to settle, and we can match the four-panel doors and moulded architraves the houses were built with.
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
Torre's Victorian villas, semis and terraces were built to be heated by fires, so nearly every room has a chimney breast with an alcove either side.
Filling those alcoves well is where Luke's background shows. He's done joinery since he was a child, it runs in his family, and he learned to deal with uneven walls in ways no course would cover. Luke and the team make every unit for its own alcove.
About Torre
Until the 1840s most of this ground belonged to the Carys of Torre Abbey and was fields and orchard. Brunel's South Devon Railway opened Torre station as a terminus in December 1848, the Cary heir came of age the following year and began laying out his land, and by 1900 the suburb was almost complete. Long Avenue, the old carriage drive to the abbey, survives as Falkland Road and Lime Avenue. The station itself is still there, timber-framed and boarded, with panelled doors and a fretted canopy. Torbay Council adopted a conservation area appraisal for Torre in 2005, and Upton next door has its own. In places, Torre's reads like a list of what has been lost to replacement windows.
The typical Torre house is square, rendered over stone, with a hipped slate roof and sashes. The appraisal picks out tall three-part windows on some Avenue Road villas, built around 1870 for visitors, which came down to the floor and had reeded shutters folding into the reveals. Plenty of those villas became hotels and guest houses, a few linked together, and some are now flats. On the smaller streets, Bampfylde Road and Vansittart Road among them, the terraces are tighter. Rooms there are narrow but tall, with generous ceiling heights on the ground floor. That is where the alcove work, the internal shutters and a lot of small-house storage come in.
Services In Torre
The houses here have good bones and not much cupboard space. Our work in Torre tends to split between putting period detail back and squeezing more storage out of rooms the Victorians designed around a fire grate.
Cupboards and shelving built into the chimney alcoves, with a desk in one side if the back bedroom has to double as an office. Scribed to the walls, and finished to sit under the original cornice.
Read more about Alcove Units & Home Offices
Sliding sashes with the right horns and glazing pattern, and four-panel front doors under a fanlight. Worth doing in timber here, because plastic replacements are the change Torre's appraisal complains about most. We copy the existing mouldings.
Read more about Timber Windows & Doors
Window seats in a bay, a narrow hall bench with shoe storage, a dresser for a kitchen with no straight wall. Pieces sized for rooms that are tall and slim rather than broad, and painted to sit with the existing woodwork.
Read more about Bespoke FurnitureWhy It Matters Here
The two recesses beside a Torre chimney breast are rarely equal widths, and both narrow towards the back. Each unit is drawn on its own measurements, so the cupboard doors line up across the breast even though the openings behind them do not.
We stop the top of the units below the picture rail or return them into the cornice, depending on the room. Nothing gets cut out of original plasterwork to make a standard cabinet height fit.
A lot of Torre sashes only need new cords, beads and a splice at the bottom rail. We repair where we can and make new sashes to the old pattern where we cannot, glazed to keep the slim glazing bars.
Hallways in the smaller Torre terraces are often narrow enough that two people cannot pass. A shallow cupboard under the stairs or a slim boot bench keeps coats and shoes off the floor without blocking the door.
Where a villa has been split into flats, rooms have odd stud walls and boxed-in pipes. We design around them rather than ripping them out, which matters when the next flat's plumbing runs through your wall.
Some Torre bays still have their shutter boxes, empty or painted shut. We can make folding panels to fit them, which keeps the heat in on winter nights and does it without touching the outside of the house.
From The Workshop
This is a wall of dark-stained timber panelling with offset square niches, each lit from above and holding a single object. We built it for a client elsewhere, not in Torre. It shows the sort of thing that can go into a chimney alcove once you stop thinking of it as a gap to fill with shelves. The lights are set into the top of each niche.
For homes in Torre, the same idea works at a smaller scale: one or two lit niches above a painted cupboard, set into the recess beside the fireplace, with the back panel in a darker timber so the space reads as deeper than it is. It suits a front room with a high ceiling, where a full run of shelving can feel like a wall of clutter. Leave the other alcove plain, or give it a cupboard.
Reassurance
Our Process
The seven stages below apply to every job, but in Torre the first visit takes longest, because we spend more of it measuring old plaster and walls than talking about doors.
We measure each alcove at the floor, at shoulder height and at the top, front and back, because they taper and lean. We note the skirting and picture rail profiles, and check whether the chimney breast is still live, capped or opened up. If the joinery involves the windows, we look at the sash boxes and cords too, and whether the house is a whole house or part of a converted villa.
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.
Fitting a pair of alcove units usually takes a day. Carcasses go in first, packed level off the old boards, then the faces are scribed to the plaster and the skirting is returned round them. We caulk and fill the last joints and leave the painting edge clean. A few months on, after the heating has dried the room out, we come back to adjust the doors.
Local
Torre has a medieval chapel on a rock, a Victorian church by a cathedral architect and a park built on an old tip. Not bad for a district most visitors only see from the train.
A small, vaulted medieval chapel on top of a limestone crag, probably built in the thirteenth or fourteenth century and possibly connected with Torre Abbey. The floor inside is the bare rock, never paved. It is a scheduled monument, and the climb up Chapel Hill gives a wide view over Torre.
Learn more about St Michael's Chapel, Chapel Hill on Google Maps
Laid out in the late 1920s on what had been a rubbish tip next to the Town Hall, with a bowling green that opened in 1928. American troops ate at a field kitchen here before D-Day. A 2021 makeover added activity zones, woodland play and restored netball courts among the old trees.
Learn more about Upton Park on Google Maps
Designed by J L Pearson while he was working on Truro Cathedral, and built in grey limestone with Bath stone dressings between 1883 and 1889. The tower was never finished. Agatha Christie was baptised here in 1890, and two listed red K6 telephone kiosks stand by the church wall.
Learn more about All Saints Church, Bampfylde Road 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
Torre prices sit in the middle of our range. Rooms are tall, so alcove units use more board than you might expect, and scribing to old plaster adds time on the day. Terraced streets near the station have tight on-street parking, which we plan around but which can add a little to delivery. Converted flats on upper floors mean carrying everything up a shared stair. Against that, the work is mostly interior and rarely needs consent. Our alcove units page gives guide prices.
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 photographs of the room and the chimney breast. We will come and measure it properly, then send a drawing of the units, the finish and a fixed price before we book the making in.
