Builders in Blackmore

The area

Blackmore is small, old and priced accordingly. The village green, the duck pond and the timber framed houses around them have made it a repeated answer to the question of where the most expensive village in Essex is, and its CM4 postcode carries an average around £834,000 on recent sold price data. There is no station, no through trade, and very little new building. What Blackmore has instead is a fixed number of houses that people hold on to, and improve.

The village fabric

What the old village is made of

Blackmore grew around a monastic core, and the church of St Laurence, with its timber tower, still anchors it. The council’s conservation area appraisal describes the buildings around it as mainly two storeys, timber framed and either rendered or built in soft red brick, with weatherboarding on the outbuildings.

That palette is what any work in the centre has to answer to. An addition to a rendered timber framed cottage needs a different approach from one to a brick house: different materials, different junctions, and often a lighter structure that reads as secondary to the original. Getting that right on paper, before a planning officer sees it, is most of the job.

Beyond the centre, and in the neighbouring hamlets of Hook End and Wyatts Green, the houses are mostly later and the gardens bigger, and the work looks more like extension work anywhere else in the borough.

The market

A village this constrained behaves differently from a town. Nothing much comes to market, so owners invest in place, and the bar for materials and finish is set by some of the oldest and best kept houses in the county. Cheap work stands out here for the wrong reasons, which suits our philosophy fine: don’t buy cheap and buy twice.

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