Engineered timber frame homes, weathertight fast. Panels made to your drawings in a factory, erected in days rather than months, and then finished by the same managed team that took the design through to the slab. Warm, airtight and predictable in a way masonry on a wet South West winter site rarely is.
A timber frame is cut from a design that has to be finalised before the panels are made. That front-loading is the point: decisions are settled on paper where they are cheap, rather than on site where they are not.
Panels are made to a millimetre and the slab has to match. Setting out, levels and the sole plate are checked and signed off before delivery, because a frame will not forgive a slab that is fifteen millimetres out of square.
A typical house frame goes up and gets its roof on inside a week or two. Every trade after that is working dry, which on a Somerset or Devon site between October and March is worth a great deal in both programme and quality.
The membrane, the tapes and the service void are what decide whether a timber frame actually performs. Penetrations planned rather than cut, and the airtightness line drawn on the design before anyone is on site with a knife.
Render, brick, stone, larch or oak cladding. The frame is the structure, not the appearance, so the outside can be whatever the site and the planners need it to be.
Frame suppliers erect frames and go. The roof, the external skin, the services, the plaster and the finishing are the other eighty percent of the job, and they run under the same fixed fee management as everything else we do.
It is different rather than better. Timber frame goes up faster, gets weathertight sooner, hits high insulation values more easily and gives a very predictable programme. Masonry has more thermal mass, is easier to alter later and is more forgiving of late design changes. On a wet site or a tight programme, timber frame usually wins. If you expect to be changing your mind about the layout during the build, it will not suit you.
The frame erection for a typical detached house is around three to seven days, with the roof following straight after so the building is weathertight inside a fortnight. What that does not include is the eight to twelve weeks of design freeze and manufacture beforehand, or the internal and external finishing afterwards. The overall build is faster than masonry, but the saving is in the middle of the programme rather than at the start.
Yes. Modern engineered timber frame is entirely standard construction, covered by the usual structural warranties and treated normally by lenders and insurers. It needs the same warranty inspections as any other new build, and those are booked and managed as part of the job.
A little. It heats up faster because there is less mass to warm, which most people like, and it can feel more acoustically live between rooms if the internal specification is thin. Both are dealt with in the design: acoustic insulation in the partitions and a sensible approach to floor construction take care of it.
Yes, and it is often the best answer where access is poor or the programme matters. A frame can be craned or hand-erected in a back garden with far less mess, muck away and scaffold time than a masonry extension, and it gets the existing house sealed up again quickly.
Both are design questions with settled answers. Fire performance comes from the linings and the cavity barriers, which are specified to the regulations and inspected. Damp comes down to keeping the timber dry: a proper breather membrane, a ventilated cavity behind the cladding, and the sole plate detailed above the finished ground level.
Somerset, Devon, Wiltshire and Dorset, with the towns and villages in between covered as a matter of course. Work further afield in the South West is taken on where the project suits us and we can give it the attention it needs.
Every project starts with a conversation, long before it starts on site.