It began with Albert Mason in 1928, on a cold February morning, cutting his first block of Ancaster limestone on a workbench his father had made him. Ninety-eight years later, his great-grandson Henry still uses the same bench.
The workshop has moved twice since those early days — once during the war, when an ill-aimed incendiary put paid to the original forge on Swine Hill, and again in 1974 when the family bought the plot we still work from today. The bench survived both moves, as did the tools, many of which bear Albert's initials on their handles.
In the intervening years we've built, restored, rebuilt, extended and rescued homes across Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and the Cotswolds. Some of them are grand country houses on Grade II* lists. Most of them are ordinary-extraordinary homes belonging to people who simply want the job done properly. We've always preferred the second sort.
"You can't hurry stone. You can only persuade it. And persuading takes time."
Henry took over from his father Walter in 2017, with a small team of five masons, a joiner, and a labourer — Old Tom — who had worked with Albert himself in the sixties. Tom retired two years ago at eighty-three, reluctantly, after cutting the lintel for a farmhouse extension the morning before he left.
Today we take on perhaps eight to ten substantial projects a year. We turn down more than we accept, not out of pride, but because the only honest way we know to build is to give each job the time it deserves. When we promise something will take sixteen weeks, it takes sixteen weeks — not twelve, not twenty. The stone decides.
What we will never do
We won't use modern cements on historic walls where lime should have gone. We won't "match" new stone with machine-cut blocks when the old was hand-dressed. We won't accept a job we can't do in-house — if a project needs us to sub out the work, it needs us to walk away. And we'll never, ever, start a job before we're ready to finish it properly.
What we will always do
We'll visit your site before quoting, in person, usually more than once. We'll talk you through the materials, the time, and the weather windows. We'll be honest about what's sensible and what's a waste of your money. And when we're done, we'll come back in a year, and the year after that, to make sure it's settling the way we said it would.
That's not marketing. That's just how you build a house.