DB Building Conservation

31/10/2024

Some more highlights from our recent repairs to this neo-gothic fantasy. Roofing is complete. Now for the interior.

27/09/2024

These chimneys were going their separate ways long before we repaired them. We needed to re-join the capping stones once the stacks had been rebuilt. One group had been joined with lead and there are lead butterfly joints keeping some of the plinth stones together so we employed the same technique - as shown in the video. You can just see the stainless rod that sits in the joint before it is encased in lead. Strength and flexibility. We formed a mold out of clay and melted down the historic lead and some new to fill the trough.

19/09/2024

Rebuilt Victorian Gothic chimneys, using a combination of new hand-made bricks made to the original patterns by Bulmer Brick and Tile and surviving originals. The ornate stacks had to be dismantled because they were unsafe, rusting metalwork removed from under the plinth stones and then everything put back together again. The brickwork of one stack was deeply eroded so we repointed using a hot lime mix designed to look like the historical mortar.

07/07/2024

Another inglenook reinstated. Always more complicated than it seems in theory because there are usually multiple historical adaptations to the flue which need to be addressed and made safe. And then there's the centuries of soot . . .
Bressumer with shelf made by Rick Lewis.

08/06/2024

Recent ceiling repair to Grade II* Walsingham Methodist chapel built in the 1790s.

30/03/2024

More early 17th century wall paintings of hunting from Madingley Hall, including wild fowl and a boar.

27/03/2024

More scenes from the bear hunt and a picture of the whole scene in situ.

27/03/2024

It was great to finally see this painting, commissioned by Sir Edward Hynde (d. 1633) to decorate the turret room of Madingley Hall near Cambridge. The mural (c. 1610) depicts fanciful hunting scenes, including that of a monstrous bear, though bears were by this time long-extinct in England. It was perhaps in part designed to reflect the fashionable aristocratic enthusiasms of King James I’s reign (1603–25). James was a fanatical hunter, whose passion for blood sports encompassed a relish for bear-baiting, a medieval ‘entertainment’ that found renewed popularity both at court and in the public Bear Garden on London’s Bankside. The great actor Edward Alleyn was ‘Master of the King’s Bears’ from 1608, and this rival entertainment made its way into the drama of the time, most famously in Shakespeare’s most enigmatic stage direction from A Winter's Tale: ‘Exit pursued by a bear’. My thanks to Dr Nick de Somogyi, the leading authority on Jacobean bears, for the opportunity to see this marvellous wall painting, even if the anonymous artist was somewhat better at dogs than bears.

19/01/2024

25/11/2023

Minor repairs and limewash to the porch of this 13th century church in Norfolk. We gave it 5 coats of hot limewash (still drying in some of the photos).
The vaulted ceiling has beautifully aged tuck-pointing.

19/11/2023

We do sometimes venture into the 21st century, as with this extension to a victorian cottage which was super insulated with Pavatex and other eco-friendly materials and finished in lime throughout. We used our own fine lime plaster finish.