Nothing here pretends to be something else.
Five materials, sourced close and specified slow. Run your hand across each one — everything we build with answers to touch, and every choice below costs more for a reason we can defend.
M-01PURBECK STONE
QUARRIED — WORTH MATRAVERS, DORSET
The ground it stands on, brought up into the walls. Stone from the county the house sits in weathers at the county's own pace — it rains here, and the walls know it. Cheaper stone arrives looking right and spends thirty years going wrong.
SPECIFIED ON EVERY SHEET
M-02ENGLISH OAK
FELLED — HEREFORDSHIRE · SEASONED 26 MONTHS
We buy trees, not timber. Twenty-six months in our own yard, stickered and turned, because a frame that moves after it is closed in is not a frame — it is a complaint.
SPECIFIED ON EVERY SHEET
M-03CAST GLASS
ROLLED — ST HELENS, MERSEYSIDE
Glass held to the same tolerances as the steel around it. The reeded panels are cast the slow way, so the light lands broken and warm — the way it did in the workshops these houses used to be.
SPECIFIED ON EVERY SHEET
M-04SHIP'S BRONZE
POURED — SHEFFIELD, TO A WHITECHAPEL PATTERN
Door furniture that wears to the shape of your hand. Bronze costs four times what plated zinc costs, and it is the only thing in the house that improves by being touched ten thousand times.
SPECIFIED ON EVERY SHEET
M-05LIME PLASTER
BURNT — CHARLESTOWN, CORNWALL
Walls that breathe. Lime takes carbon back as it cures and forgives a house its movement. Cement is faster, harder and wrong — we stopped arguing about this in 2013.
SPECIFIED ON EVERY SHEET