Builders in Leatherhead, beside the river Mole.

Leatherhead grew up where the road crossed the river Mole, and the town still reads that way. The oldest part sits on the western side around Church Street and Bridge Street, where the parish church, the timber framed and tile hung buildings and a scatter of listed properties give the town a proper historic core. Walk five minutes north or east and you are into a completely different century: the streets that filled in after the railway arrived, then the 1930s semis, then the confident post war housing that took the town out towards Leatherhead Common and Barnett Wood Lane. Head south and west instead and the plots open right out, up Hawks Hill and Givons Grove and on into Fetcham and Oxshott, where houses sit well back behind gravel drives and mature planting.

That mix is why no two jobs in KT22 are alike. On the older properties near the church we are working with soft brick, peg tiles, lime mortar and timber, where careful repair almost always beats replacement. On the inter war semis around Poplar Road, Highlands Road and Kingston Road we are usually opening up the back of the house, taking out the old rear wall on a steel and building a single storey kitchen extension with proper glazing onto a long, narrow garden. The post war stock around Randalls Road and the Common tends to have generous roof space and a shallow pitch that suits a dormer or a hip to gable conversion. Out at Fetcham and Oxshott the conversations are bigger again: a wraparound, a garden room, a full internal refit, or in some cases a replacement house on an existing plot.

The ground here changes fast, and it matters more than most people expect. South of the town the chalk of the North Downs comes up towards Mickleham and Box Hill. North and east you are into London Clay, which shrinks and swells with the seasons and reacts badly to the mature oaks, limes and beeches that make this part of Surrey look the way it does. Along the Mole valley itself, through Fetcham Grove and the low ground either side of the bridge, there is river gravel, alluvium and a real history of flooding. Foundation depths, drainage strategy and where the water goes in a heavy winter are all things we work out on your plot rather than assume. We dig trial holes, take engineering advice when a job needs it, and price the groundworks on what is actually down there.

Planning goes through Mole Valley District Council, whose offices are a short run down the A24 in Dorking. The town centre and Church Street sit within a conservation area, several buildings in and around the old core are listed, and much of the land beyond the built up edge is Green Belt. To the south, the countryside around Mickleham, Westhumble and Box Hill falls within the Surrey Hills National Landscape, where anything visible from the valley gets looked at very closely indeed. In practice that means the design has to be right before it goes in. Materials, window proportions, roof pitch and the way an extension steps down from the original house all matter, and permitted development rights are restricted on some properties. Checking what applies to your address is the first thing we do, because finding out late is what stalls projects.

We have been building across this part of Surrey since 1996, from our base in Reigate, which is a straight run across on the A25 and A24. We do not employ architects. We work alongside them, so you can bring your own drawings or we can introduce you to designers we have worked with for years and trust. After that it is one team and one point of contact, from the soil in the ground to the keys in your hand. We are CHAS accredited, SSIP assessed and fully insured, we keep a clean and considerate site, and we tell you what is happening next before you have to ask.