Bespoke joinery in Totnes starts from an unusual position: there are roughly 321 listed buildings inside the town's conservation area, and a good share of them line Fore Street and High Street. We make and repair joinery for them from our workshop in Barton. The typical brief here is not a new kitchen in a blank room. It is a run of six-over-six sashes with a few rotten rails, a panelled door from a side passage that has dropped, or a piece of furniture for a room where a merchant once traded from the ground floor. We work in oak and in painted softwood, cut traditional joints where they suit the piece, and finish with oils and paints that a conservation officer will recognise. Customers here also tend to ask where the timber came from, which is a fair question and one we answer on the quote.
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
With hundreds of listed buildings inside its conservation area, Totnes asks for joinery that repairs and copies far more often than it replaces.
That kind of work leans on knowledge rather than catalogues. Luke has been doing joinery since childhood, the trade runs in his family, and some of what he uses was never taught at any college. Luke and the team bring it from Barton.
About Totnes
Cloth and tin made Totnes rich. By 1523 it was assessed as the second-richest town in Devon and sixteenth in England, ahead of Worcester and Lincoln. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries its merchants rebuilt their homes in competition with one another: tall, narrow, timber-framed houses facing the street, two rooms deep, with the ground floor given over to trade and a passage leading back to a courtyard, kitchen block and long burgage plot. Inside they put up panelling, carved chimneypieces and plaster ceilings. The Elizabethan house at 70 Fore Street, built about 1575, is the most complete survivor. Enough of the others remain that South Hams describes Totnes as one of the finest Elizabethan and Jacobean towns in England.
Later owners did not knock them down. They re-fronted them. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the timber framing was rendered over or hung with slate, gables were turned into hipped roofs, and leaded mullions gave way to vertical sliding sashes, mostly six over six and painted white. So a Totnes house is often two buildings at once, an Elizabethan frame behind a Georgian face, and the joinery inside can belong to either. Doors usually have six panels, often with a fanlight over, and the long narrow plots behind the houses still follow their medieval boundaries. Getting listed building work right here means working out which period you are dealing with before anything is drawn. Sometimes the answer is both, in the same room.
Services In Totnes
Totnes asks more of a joiner than most towns. The houses are listed, the shops are independent and particular, and plenty of owners have firm views on materials. These are the three services that come up in the town again and again.
The town's sashes are a large part of why it looks the way it does. We repair them first, splicing new timber of the same species into decayed rails and sills, and only make a full replacement when the frame is beyond saving, copying the original glazing bar exactly.
Read more about Timber Windows & Doors
Oak tables, dressers and bookcases with mortise and tenon or dovetailed joints, finished in oil or wax rather than lacquer. Furniture in a room with original panelling has to share the space with it, so we size and detail each piece to the room it is going into.
Read more about Bespoke Furniture
The independent shops on Fore Street and High Street need counters, display shelving and shopfront repairs that suit a listed building. We draw them, make them in the workshop and can plan the fitting around your opening hours.
Read more about Commercial Joinery & ShopfittingWhy It Matters Here
South Hams' own draft appraisal supports keeping and refurbishing old sashes, by stripping excess paint and splicing in matching timber. That is exactly how we approach them, which keeps the slim glazing bars and any surviving old glass in place.
Double glazing rarely suits a listed sash. Draught-proofing, secondary glazing and well-made interior shutters cut heat loss without touching the window itself, and they are changes a conservation officer is far more likely to accept.
Pegged mortise and tenons, housed shelves and hand-cut dovetails are slower to make than screwed joints, but they belong in these houses and they can be taken apart and repaired by the next joiner, a century from now.
Oil, wax and traditional paint can all be patched and renewed in place. A sprayed lacquer cannot, short of stripping it. In a building that will keep being looked after, the finish should be one somebody can touch up.
Since 2006 Totnes has been known as the first Transition Town, and many of our customers here care about where materials come from. Tell us at the survey if certified timber matters to you and we will specify it, and name it, on the quote.
The six-panel doors to the side passages, set back from the street, are a feature of the town's merchant houses. They take a battering from weather and use. We rehang, repair or remake them to the original panel layout.
From The Workshop
This is one of our joiners in the Barton workshop, sitting on a step beside the machinery with a small dog on his lap. Behind him are the extraction ducting, a bench and racks of fixings and sealants. It is not a showroom, and we would not want it to be. Every piece we fit is drawn, cut and put together in this building before it goes out of the door.
That matters for anyone commissioning joinery for a listed house in Totnes. You can come and see the timber for your job before it is cut, check the joints on a dry-assembled frame, and talk to the person who will fit it. If provenance and workmanship are part of the reason you are going bespoke, it helps to see where the work actually happens.
Reassurance
Our Process
Our process does not change in Totnes, but the paperwork around it often does. Expect the drawing stage to include material for a listed building consent application, and allow time for South Hams to decide it.
We visit and look before we measure. In a Totnes merchant house we record which joinery belongs to the original frame and which arrived with a later re-fronting, take profiles off sashes, doors and panelling, and photograph everything for the consent file. We also look at access through the side passage, because on Fore Street that is often the only way in for long components.
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 is done by the same people who made the piece, with lime plaster, old panelling and wide floorboards protected throughout. We fix into historic fabric only where the drawing says we can and use reversible fixings wherever possible. Then we go round the finished work with you, note any adjustments and return after the first winter to deal with any movement in the timber.
Local
The best way to understand Totnes buildings is to walk up the hill through them. These three places, two in the town and one just outside it, cover nine centuries between them.
One of the best-preserved Norman motte and bailey castles in England, raised on the highest point of the ridge above the town. It began as a timber fort, probably built by Juhel of Totnes after 1068. The stone shell keep and curtain wall on top of the mound date from around the fourteenth century. English Heritage has looked after it since 1984.
Learn more about Totnes Castle on Google Maps
The museum occupies the Grade I listed merchant's house at 70 Fore Street, built around 1575 for the Kelland family and restored after the town council bought it in 1958. Twelve rooms over three floors trace the town from prehistory onwards, with a gallery on Charles Babbage, who went to school in Totnes, and a herb garden at the back. Entry is free.
Learn more about Totnes Elizabethan House Museum on Google Maps
Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst bought the medieval hall at Dartington in 1925 and began remaking its gardens, which now cover 26 acres and are listed Grade II*. The grassed terraces of the tiltyard, clipped yew and a Henry Moore reclining figure are the parts most people remember. The grounds open every day, and there is an entry charge for non-members.
Learn more about Dartington Hall Gardens 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
Listed status changes the cost of a Totnes job more than anything else, mainly through time: drawings for consent, and a wait for the decision before work can start. Access comes next. Fore Street and High Street are steep and narrow, parking is scarce, and long items such as stair strings or shopfront fascias often have to come through a side passage, which shapes how we make them. Repairs cost less in materials than new work but more in hours, and solid oak costs more than painted softwood. Our bespoke furniture page shows guide ranges.
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 a few photographs and tell us whether the building is listed. We will say whether it looks like a repair or new work, what consent may be involved and roughly what it will cost, then arrange a survey to measure it properly.
