Out & About Spring 2018

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SEE IT. FEEL IT. LOVE IT. HARTWOOD OAK BUILDINGS, CLASSIC BUILDINGS HANDCRAFTED FROM BRITISH OAK from first meeting through design and planning, construction and then on to final completion, the team will handle all matters and help to make your dreams a reality

The high cost of moving house these days can be a very serious consideration for anyone contemplating such a step. Often a well-designed and beautiful extension can represent much be�er value for money while providing the reinvigoration required to make a home feel new and exciting. Hartwood Oak Buildings Ltd is a well-established company that can help you through the steps to reach this point. Their beautifully constructed, handmade oak-framed buildings form the centre piece of many hundreds of homes in the Thames Valley, providing spectacular extensions as well as stand-alone buildings for kitchens, living rooms, playrooms, bedrooms, home offices, garages, barns and many more uses. Hartwood Oak Buildings has been in business for almost twenty-five years and started in a small open-sided shed in Highclere. The original partners Sam McCallum and Tim Green are still jointly at the helm and are fully involved in the meeting of new customers, guiding them through the process of initial design and costing before handing them over to the care of the rest of the team. That team now includes Tim’s daughter Helen who, from a background in art and design in London including a period at The Royal Drawing School is responsible for design and planning. On-site management is the responsibility of son James who, following experience working

right around the world with a great many of them still standing, some of them here in Britain. “It is still wrongly believed by some that green oak splits and bends to a horrifying degree and that only seasoned or dried timber must be used in construction” Tim says, “This is simply not true. What is true is that if the characteristics of green oak are not fully understood and taken into account in the jointing and completion of a frame installation, problems will occur. We have the skills in design and execution to ensure that we are able to manufacture, insulate, glaze and roof green oak frames that if properly maintained will be a joy for ever and outlast all of us!” Hartwood Oak Buildings have built structures as diverse in scale as a small canopy porch over a front door to a 450 square metre barn complex, although by far the projects they are most often engaged to carry out are glazed, single or two-storey extensions, often to accommodate a kitchen or master bedroom suite. Every project is treated with equal care and the designers and carpenters are every bit as pleased with a beautiful structure that has taken a day to put up than they are with a project that may have taken months to complete.

in timber framed construction in Australia and New Zealand then worked his way up from the shop floor to take on one of the key roles in the business. The office staff are backed up by a great team of skilled carpenters working from both workshop and on site to bring the designs to fruition. Their abilities have earned them many plaudits from customers who have been impressed by their talents during the build and in the finished result. An oak framed garden room is also a fantastic way to extend and improve a home without creating a huge amount of disturbance to the rest of the property both during construction and with regard to the final layout. This has always been true when adding a conservatory but an oak framed garden room gives so much more than any conservatory. It is a space that can be enjoyed all year round and is neither too cold in winter nor too hot in summer. The buildings are constructed of fresh sawn ‘green’ oak. The term ‘green’ referring to the newness of the timber rather than its colour. That very rawness is what makes the material so unique in construction as when it’s freshly sawn the timber is easy to work, making joint cu�ing a pleasure and construction of large dimension timbers possible. Green oak has been used for over a thousand years to construct domestic and commercial buildings

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