Builders in Shenfield

The area

Shenfield’s market changed the day the Elizabeth line opened. The eastern terminus put Liverpool Street within a direct run, and the roads between the station and Hutton Mount, already some of Brentwood borough’s most sought after, moved further out of reach: recent sold price data puts the Shenfield average approaching £1 million. When the house next door costs that much to buy, improving the one you own is usually the better trade, and that is most of the work we do here.

The houses here

What Shenfield houses ask for

Shenfield is mostly twentieth century. Brentwood’s suburbs spread out this way after the Second World War, and the result is a place of detached and semi-detached family houses on proper gardens, with larger individual houses on the roads towards Hutton Mount. There is no old village core of any size and no conservation area, which shapes the work: the question here is rarely how to protect the fabric, and usually how to make a sound house live the way its owners do now.

That tends to mean three kinds of project:

• The ground floor that never opened up. Houses of this era were built with a separate kitchen, a separate dining room and a front room kept for best. A rear or wrap around extension, often with a wall or two taken out through an internal layout change, turns them into one space onto the garden.
• The roof that holds a suite. Deep roofs on the detached stock convert into a principal bedroom with its own bathroom, rather than a box room.
• The complete rethink. Owners who have bought for the road and the station often take the whole house back and rebuild it around themselves, finished to the standard the address expects.

The market

At Shenfield values, the cost of building is a smaller share of the asset than almost anywhere else in Essex, which changes the calculation: the specification that would be brave in an average market is simply appropriate here. It is also a market where a poor finish shows at resale. Our answer is the same one Craig gives every client: don’t buy cheap and buy twice.

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