A Victorian brick property in Surrey under restoration by I.C Developments, with the site hoarding in place at dusk

Design & Build Service

Old homes, carefully renewed.

Older and period homes brought sympathetically back to life, keeping the character you fell for while quietly updating everything behind it.

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CHAS Accredited SSIP Assessed Fully Insured Building since 1996

The service

An older home has a story in its walls. Our job is to respect it, repair it, and let it live comfortably in the present day.

Surrey is full of homes with real history: solid brick villas, tile-hung cottages, Victorian and Edwardian terraces, farmhouses that have grown room by room over a century or more. We restore them for the people who love them, mending what time has worn and leaving the character firmly intact.

Restoration is a slower, more careful kind of building. We start by understanding how the house was actually put together, then work with the grain of it rather than against it. Original brick, timber, plaster and detail are repaired and matched, not ripped out and replaced with something that never quite fits.

Behind that gentle face, everything can be brought up to date. Heating that finally warms the whole house, wiring you can trust, sensible insulation, a kitchen and bathrooms that work for how you live now. The result feels like the home you always knew, just warmer, drier and easier to live in.

Older homes are worth the extra care. Repair what can be saved, replace only what cannot, and let the house go on being itself.

I.C Developments · Building since 1996

Our approach

What we keep, and what we quietly upgrade.

Two lists run side by side on every period job. One protects the house as it is. The other brings it into the present, without leaving a mark on the front elevation.

Kept and repaired

Character

Original brickwork and pointing, cut out by hand and repointed in lime so the wall breathes and the colour still matches.
Sash windows and joinery, with rotten sections spliced out, cords and weights overhauled and new sections made to the old profile.
Fireplaces, whether that means opening one back up, relining the flue or simply cleaning the original surround and hearth.
Cornicing and mouldings, with missing runs taken from a mould of what survives so the room reads as one age again.
Roof tiles and chimney detail, keeping the original clay or slate where it can be salvaged and reusing it on the front slope.

Renewed behind it

Comfort

Wiring taken back to a new consumer unit, with sockets and switches placed sensibly and cables chased in while floors are up.
Plumbing and heating renewed, with a boiler sized for a solid wall house and radiators or underfloor that actually warm the rooms.
Insulation where it can be done sympathetically, usually loft, floors and breathable linings rather than sealing an old wall shut.
Damp and timber put right at the cause, from ground levels and gutters to replacing any joist ends that have gone soft.
Kitchens and bathrooms fitted to suit the house, so the practical rooms work hard without shouting over the older ones.

The work itself

Repairs done properly.

The detail behind the five jobs that come up most often on an older Surrey home.

A rebuilt brick chimney stack on a Surrey property, showing careful brickwork and flaunching — Chimney rebuilt

Roof and chimney repair work underway on an older Surrey property — Roof and chimney repairs

Two I.C Developments team members in hi-vis and hard hats working beneath a new steel beam — Our team on site

Brick and stone

Failed pointing is raked out by hand, never with an angle grinder, and repointed in a lime mortar mixed to match the original in colour and softness. Spalled bricks are cut out singly and replaced with reclaimed stock of the same size and shade. Where a bay or a parapet has moved, we take it down carefully, number the bricks and rebuild it on a sound base.

Chimneys

Stacks take the worst of the weather, so they are often the first thing to fail. We rebuild leaning or open jointed stacks, renew flaunching and pots, fit new lead flashings and soakers, and reline flues where a fire or a stove is going back in. Redundant stacks get properly capped and vented so they stay dry rather than sweating into the bedroom below.

Windows and doors

Original sashes and casements are almost always worth saving. Rotten cills and bottom rails are spliced out in matching timber, weights and cords are renewed, and beads and staff are eased so the sash runs again. Slim double glazing or secondary glazing can go in where it is allowed. New joinery is made to the existing profile, not to a catalogue.

Damp and timber

We find out why a wall is wet before we treat it. That usually means checking ground levels, gutters, downpipes, bridged cavities and blocked airbricks first. Modern cement renders and plastics that trap moisture come off and breathable lime finishes go back on. Any joist ends, wall plates or lintels that have rotted are cut back to sound timber and replaced.

Interior detail

Cornice, ceiling roses, architrave, skirting and panelling are repaired in place where possible. Missing lengths are run from a mould taken off the surviving original so the joins disappear once painted. Lath and plaster is patched rather than stripped where it is sound, and original floorboards are lifted, cleaned, refixed and finished.

Permissions

Listed buildings and conservation areas.

Two different sets of rules, often confused with each other, and both worth understanding before anybody prices the work.

Consent is not a hurdle to get around. It is the part of the job that quietly decides what the finished house looks like.

A listed building is one that appears on the National Heritage List for England because of its architectural or historic interest. The grades are I, II* and II, and the great majority of listed homes in Surrey are Grade II. Listing protects the whole building, inside and out, not only the elevation you can see from the road. It can also cover things fixed to the building and structures that have stood in its grounds since before July 1948, which is why a garden wall, an outbuilding or a set of railings can turn out to be protected when nobody expected it.

Listed building consent is a separate permission from planning permission, and the two are not interchangeable. A project can need one, the other, or both. Consent is required for work that affects the character of the building as a building of special interest, and that catches far more than most owners expect: taking out a chimney breast, replacing windows, removing a fireplace, re-plastering a room in gypsum, lifting original floors, altering internal walls, even repointing in the wrong mortar. Carrying out that work without consent is a criminal offence rather than a planning breach, and the council can require it to be put back. There is no application fee for listed building consent itself, although the survey, the drawings and the heritage statement behind it all cost money.

A conservation area is different. The council designates a whole street or district for its character, and the individual house is not separately protected. What changes is that permitted development rights are cut back. Cladding, side extensions, some roof alterations and dormers usually need an application, demolishing a building or a boundary wall needs permission, and you have to give the council six weeks written notice before lopping or felling almost any tree in the area. Some conservation areas also carry an Article 4 direction, which removes further rights, most often the right to change windows, doors, roof coverings or front boundary walls without asking first.

In our part of Surrey these decisions sit with Reigate and Banstead Borough Council, Tandridge District Council, Mole Valley District Council and their neighbours. Each has its own conservation officer and its own local guidance, and the council consults Historic England before deciding work to a Grade I or Grade II* building.

Before you commit to a design, our guide to planning permission in Surrey is worth twenty minutes of your time. It explains which route a project is likely to take, what the eight week determination period really means once validation is added, and where local applications most often come unstuck, which is usually the cheapest lesson you will ever get. There is more in the same vein on our guides page.

We do not draw the application ourselves. We work alongside your architect or heritage consultant, and if you do not have one we can introduce you to architects we trust who work on older buildings regularly. What we add at that stage is the practical side: what can genuinely be repaired, what has to be replaced, and what a drawing will cost to build once it reaches the site.

The people involved

Working with a conservation officer.

Bring them in early and the job runs. Surprise them halfway through and it stops.

A conservation officer advises the council on how proposed work affects a listed building or a conservation area. They are not there to say no. Most would far rather discuss a scheme while it is still a sketch, when a detail can be changed for nothing, than see it for the first time on a formal application with a fee attached. In our experience the period projects that run smoothly are almost always the ones where somebody picked up the phone early.

Ask before you draw

Most councils offer pre-application advice on listed and conservation work, sometimes free and sometimes for a modest fee. An early conversation about principle, materials and the parts of the building that matter most will usually save far more than it costs, and it tells your designer where the boundaries sit.

Record what is already there

A measured survey and a proper set of photographs of the building as found are worth having before anything is touched. They support the application, they settle arguments later on, and they give whoever repairs the joinery or runs the cornice something accurate to copy.

Explain the significance

A listed building application normally needs a heritage statement setting out what is special about the building and how the proposal affects it. Written well, it answers the officer's questions before they are asked. Written as an afterthought, it invites a refusal and another three months.

Agree the details in writing

Mortar mix and sand, pointing profile, brick source, tile type, paint system, timber sections and glazing. On a listed building these are frequently conditions of the consent rather than matters of taste, so they need signing off before anything is ordered rather than after it arrives on site.

Let them see the work

Officers often want to visit while the fabric is open. We put up a sample panel of pointing for approval, photograph anything that has to be covered up, and hand you the correspondence and the sign offs at the end so the paperwork follows the house to the next owner.

Materials

Lime, cement and how an old wall actually works.

The most common damage we are called out to was not caused by age. It was caused by a modern repair on a building that was never built to take one.

Mortar

Why cement damages a soft old wall

A solid wall was built to move a little and to dry out through its joints. Lime mortar is deliberately softer than the brick around it, so it absorbs that movement, cracks in the joint rather than the brick, and lets moisture leave the wall as vapour. Ordinary cement mortar does the opposite. It is harder and much less permeable than most handmade brick, so water that gets in has to escape through the face of the brick instead. A winter or two of frost and the face blows off. You can read the history of a house in its joints: sound where the old lime survives, and spalled brick faces wherever somebody repointed in cement.

Raked out by hand. Old joints are cut back with hand tools to roughly twice the joint width, never opened up with an angle grinder that widens the joint and chews the brick edges.
Mixed to match. Lime and sharp sand matched to the original for colour and softness, using a natural hydraulic lime where the exposure calls for it and a lime putty mix where it does not.
Protected while it cures. Lime hates frost and fast drying, so external work is kept to the milder months, damped down and covered with hessian while it sets.

A brick and clay tile house under scaffold with new dormer windows and open window reveals

Moisture

Damp in an old house is usually a rainwater problem

Older houses were built without a damp proof course and they cope perfectly well, provided the water that goes in can get out again. Nine times out of ten the cause of a wet wall is something ordinary: a blocked or leaking gutter, a cracked gully, a downpipe discharging behind the render, garden and patio levels raised above the internal floor, a bridged airbrick, or a cement render holding the wall in a waterproof coat. Curing the cause is cheaper than treating the symptom, and it is the only repair that lasts. Injected chemical courses and waterproof renders are sold hard and rarely answer the question of why the wall got wet.

Find it before treating it. Gutters, downpipes, gullies, ground levels, pointing and flashings all get checked before anyone reaches for a chemical.
Let the wall breathe. Cement render and gypsum plaster come off a wet wall, breathable lime finishes go back on, and the paint over them has to be breathable too.
Allow it to dry. A wall soaked for years takes months to give the water back, so drying time goes into the programme rather than getting decorated over.

The same rule governs insulation. Sealing a solid wall behind an impermeable internal lining is one of the quickest ways to rot the joist ends buried in it, because the moisture that used to evaporate off the inside face now condenses inside the build up where nobody can see it happening. Where insulation makes sense we take the safe gains first: the loft, the floors, draught proofing and secondary glazing. Where a wall genuinely needs lining we use breathable materials such as wood fibre finished in lime plaster. Building Regulations recognise all of this. The guidance allows sensible flexibility for buildings of traditional construction where full compliance would harm the fabric or create a moisture problem, and a conservation officer will expect that case to be argued properly rather than ignored.

The houses

The older homes we are asked about most.

Age changes the answer. What we find behind the plaster in a Georgian house is not what we find in a house built in 1935, and the right repair is different in each.

Surrey packs a wide spread of building ages into a small area. Within a few miles of Reigate there are brick and flint cottages, tile hung farmhouses, Georgian townhouses, whole streets of Victorian and Edwardian villas and estates of solidly built houses from between the wars. Each was put together with different materials and different ideas about how a wall should behave, so the first hour of any survey goes on working out exactly what we are standing in. Our areas we cover page lists the towns and villages where most of this work sits, and the housing stock changes noticeably from one to the next.

Georgian and Regency

Soft handmade brick, lime mortar throughout, tall sliding sashes with slender glazing bars and no damp proof course anywhere. Handsome and more fragile than they look. Most of the damage we are called to was done by a later cement repair rather than by time.

Victorian and Edwardian

The bulk of our restoration work. Solid nine inch walls or very early cavities, slate or clay tile roofs, deep skirtings and cornices, and a chimney on every gable. The usual list is pointing, chimneys, sash overhaul, damp at ground level and a full rewire.

Cottages and farmhouses

Often three or four separate builds pretending to be one house, added to across two centuries. Timber frame, brick infill, flint, and roofs that dip and change pitch halfway along. Nothing is square, little is standard, and repairs are made to fit rather than bought off a shelf.

Between the wars

Bay fronted semis and detached houses from the 1920s and 1930s. Early cavity walls, clay drains, cut roofs with useful height and original casements. Rarely listed, but the detailing is worth keeping rather than stripping off in favour of something plainer.

Matching

Matching brick, tile and joinery.

A repair only disappears when the material, the size, the bond and the finish are all right. Getting one of the four wrong is enough to see it from the pavement.

Matching is patient work, and most of it happens before anybody lifts a trowel. We take samples, measure what is there and then go looking for the nearest thing available rather than the nearest thing convenient. Where an exact match cannot be found, we would sooner take sound material off a hidden elevation for the front of the house and use the new stock where it will never be seen. There is a fair spread of finished jobs on our recent work page, including older homes where the whole point of the repair is that you cannot pick it out.

Brick size and bond

Bricks made before the change to metric sizes are a different height to a modern brick, so new stock laid into an old wall will not line through with the coursing. We measure the existing brick, match the size, and lay to the bond that is already there, whether that is Flemish, English or a later stretcher bond on a cavity wall.

Colour and texture

Surrey brickwork runs from soft reds and yellows to multi stocks and flint. We match with reclaimed brick where the right thing can be found, and with a handmade brick where it cannot. Samples are laid up dry against the wall and looked at in daylight before anything is ordered in quantity.

Pointing profile

The shape of the joint matters as much as the mix. A flush or slightly recessed joint reads correctly on most older brickwork and sheds water off the brick. The hard raised ribbon left behind by a 1970s repair looks wrong from the road, holds water against the face and is usually the first thing to come out.

Roof tiles and slate

Handmade clay peg tiles, machine made plain tiles and Welsh slate all weather differently, so one roof rarely needs one answer. We salvage whatever can be reused for the slopes you can see, buy reclaimed to fill the gaps, and keep new material for the rear and the hidden pitches.

Joinery and mouldings

Profiles are taken off the original with a template and the new sections are made to match, not ordered from a catalogue. Timber is chosen for the job and the exposure, glazing bar widths are kept as they were, and the paint system is picked so the wood can still let moisture go.

Ironmongery and detail

Sash fasteners, pulleys, casement stays, hinges, letter plates, fanlights and rainwater goods all carry the age of a house. Original items are freed off, repaired and put back wherever they survive, and anything missing is replaced to the same pattern rather than the cheapest equivalent.

Windows

Sash windows: repair or replace?

Original windows almost always look worse than they are. Rot is usually local, and the parts that fail first are the parts that can be renewed.

A box sash is a repairable object by design. It comes apart, the sashes lift out, and the pieces most likely to have gone, the cill, the bottom rail and the lower ends of the stiles, can be cut back to sound timber and spliced with new. The glass is often the oldest thing in the house, with a faint ripple that modern glass does not have, and that alone is worth keeping. Replacement makes sense when a window has already been replaced badly, when the box and pulley stiles have rotted beyond splicing, or when what is there was never right for the building in the first place.

Repair and overhaul

Usually first

Rotten cills, bottom rails and stile ends cut out and spliced in matching timber, so most of the original window stays in the wall.
Cords, weights, pulleys, parting beads and staff beads renewed, and both sashes eased so the window runs and holds where you leave it.
Brush draught seals let into the beads, which takes out most of the rattle and the draught without changing what the window looks like.
Original glass kept wherever it survives, cracked panes replaced and the putty lines cut back and made good before painting.
Secondary glazing on the inside where noise or heat loss is the real complaint. It is reversible, which conservation officers tend to prefer.

Replace, when it is right

Sometimes

Windows already swapped for the wrong pattern, where going back to the original design lifts the whole elevation rather than one opening.
Frames gone through the box and the pulley stiles, where splicing would leave more new timber in the window than old.
New sashes made to the measured profile of the original, in the same timber sections, with the same glazing bar widths.
Slim double glazed units where the rebate will take them and the consent allows, otherwise single glazing with secondary behind it.
Weights and cords rather than spiral balances, so the new window moves and sounds the way the rest of the house does.

As general market guidance across Surrey, overhauling and draught proofing an existing box sash tends to land somewhere between about £400 and £900 per window, while a new sash made to match the original is more often £1,200 to £2,500. Those are ranges the market is working to rather than our price list, and they move with the size of the window, the amount of rot and whether the work needs consent. A real figure only ever follows a site visit and a written quotation.

The quotation

What a quote covers, and what it does not.

Restoration quotes vary far more than extension quotes, because two builders can be pricing completely different amounts of repair. Here is how ours is put together.

Included in our price

Site set up, welfare, protection and dust control
Scaffolding, access towers and temporary roofs
Skips, muck away and keeping the road usable
The building work itself, labour and materials
Lime pointing, lime plastering and matched brickwork
Roofing, leadwork, flashings and chimney repairs
Joinery repairs and new sections made to match
Building control inspections and site liaison
Making good, cleaning down and the handover file

Usually priced separately

Architect or designer's drawings
Structural engineer's calculations
Heritage statement and specialist reports
Planning and building control application fees
Party wall surveyor, where a shared wall is affected
Measured survey and photographic record
Asbestos survey, and licensed removal if any is found
Kitchens, sanitaryware and appliances, shown as an allowance
Floor coverings, blinds, curtains and furniture

Worth knowing

VAT at 20 percent applies to most work on an existing home
Provisional sums cover what cannot be seen yet, adjusted on actual cost
A contingency of 10 to 15 percent is sensible on any older building
Variations are priced and agreed in writing before we carry them out
Payments are staged against work completed, never a large sum up front
Any material substitution is put to you rather than decided for you
Guarantees and certificates are collected into one file at handover

VAT catches people out on listed homes in particular. Approved alterations to a listed dwelling were zero rated until October 2012 and have not been since, so assume the standard 20 percent applies unless your accountant or the HMRC guidance tells you otherwise. A reduced rate can apply to a house that has stood empty for two years or more, and to certain changes of use, which is worth checking before the work starts rather than after it finishes. When you compare two quotations, what matters is simply whether each one states VAT plainly. A quote that never mentions it is not the cheaper quote, it is the incomplete one.

The other honest warning about restoration is that some of the work cannot be priced properly until it is opened up. A wall may be sound behind the plaster or it may not, and a bricked up opening or a badly removed chimney breast only announces itself once the ceiling comes down. We price what we can see, put clear provisional sums against what we cannot, and tell you the day something changes rather than at the end. That is also why we recommend keeping a contingency back on any period property, even where the survey went well.

Programme

How long the work takes.

General ranges for planning your year. Every one of them moves with the size of the house, the access, the ground conditions and how long the permissions take.

Restoration runs to a slower clock than new work. Materials have to be found rather than ordered, lime needs time to cure, wet walls give their water back over months rather than weeks, and consent has a timetable that nobody on site can speed up. The figures below are the ranges we plan around. They are for budgeting your time, not a promise about your house, and you get a proper written programme once we have surveyed it.

Survey to written quote

Usually 1 to 3 weeks from the visit. Longer where a structural engineer, a drainage check or a specialist report is needed before anyone can price the work with confidence.

Consent and planning

Councils work to an eight week determination period for most householder and listed building applications. Once you add drawings, a heritage statement, validation and any pre-application advice, 3 to 6 months from first meeting to decision is the realistic figure.

Repointing an elevation

Around 2 to 4 weeks per elevation once the scaffold is standing, depending on the size of the wall and how much old mortar has to come out by hand. External lime work is kept to the milder months, so a winter enquiry usually means a spring start.

Chimney rebuild

Roughly 1 to 3 weeks per stack, including scaffold, brickwork, flaunching, pots, lead flashings and making good the roof around it. Relining a flue for a fire or a stove adds a few days.

Sash window overhaul

Allow 1 to 2 days per window for an overhaul carried out in place, or 3 to 6 weeks for a whole house where sashes go back to the workshop and return in batches so the house is never fully open.

Damp repairs and lime plaster

Two to six weeks of work, then patience. Lime plaster needs weeks to carry and dry before it can be decorated, and a wall that has been wet for years can take a full drying season to settle down properly.

Roof repair or recovering

A local repair is a matter of days. Stripping and recovering a roof, salvaging sound tiles, renewing battens, underlay, lead and rainwater goods, is usually 4 to 8 weeks on a house of average size.

Full period refurbishment

Six to twelve months for a three or four bedroom house taken back and rebuilt properly, covering structure, roof, services, joinery, plastering, kitchen and bathrooms. Larger houses and listed interiors run longer.

Two practical points. Older houses always turn something up, so we build a little float into the programme rather than pretending they do not. And most families move out for a full refurbishment, because living around a rewire, a re-plaster and a roof all at once is harder than it sounds. If you would rather stay put, say so at the survey and we will phase the work so that there is always a kitchen, a working bathroom and heat.

Good to know

Restoration questions.

Do you work on listed buildings?

Yes. We take real care with listed and older homes, and we are used to working within the constraints that come with them. Where listed building consent is needed, we help you understand what is required and work closely with the conservation officer so everything is done properly.

Do you match original materials?

Wherever we can. We source matching or reclaimed brick, tile and timber, and use lime mortars and traditional detailing so repairs sit naturally alongside the original. The aim is always that you cannot tell the new work from the old.

How do you deal with damp and old walls?

Old houses were built to breathe, so we start by finding out why the damp is really there rather than covering it up. That often means gentler, traditional fixes: repointing, better drainage, breathable finishes and sensible ventilation, so the walls stay dry without being sealed up in a way that causes new problems.

Can you add modern comforts sympathetically?

That is the heart of what we do. Heating, wiring, insulation, kitchens and bathrooms can all be brought right up to date and tucked out of sight, so the house looks true to its age but lives like a modern home, warm, quiet and easy to run.

How long does restoration work take?

Older homes reveal a few surprises once you open them up, so restoration is rarely rushed. We give you a realistic programme at the start, keep you updated as we go, and would always rather do it right than do it fast. Timescales depend on the size of the house and the condition we find.

What is the difference between planning permission and listed building consent?

They are separate permissions and a project can need one, the other, or both. Planning permission deals with what a building looks like from outside and how it affects the area around it. Listed building consent deals with the special interest of the building itself, inside and out, so it can be needed for internal work that planning would never look at, such as removing a fireplace or re-plastering a room. There is no application fee for listed building consent, but carrying out the work without it is a criminal offence rather than a planning breach, so it is always worth checking first.

Do you repair sash windows or replace them?

We repair wherever the window will take it, which is most of the time. Rot is usually confined to the cill, the bottom rail and the ends of the stiles, and those sections can be spliced out in matching timber while the rest of the window stays. Cords, weights and beads are renewed, draught seals are let into the beads and the original glass is kept. Replacement makes sense when the box has rotted beyond splicing, or when a previous owner fitted something that was never right for the house, and then we make new sashes to the profile of the original.

What happens if you find something unexpected once the work has started?

We tell you the same day and put a price to it before we carry on. Older buildings hide things, and a rotten wall plate, a bricked up opening or a chimney breast taken out badly forty years ago will not show itself until the fabric is opened up. Anything we cannot see at quotation stage is either carried as a provisional sum or flagged to you as a risk, we recommend a contingency of 10 to 15 percent on any older property, and no extra work is ever carried out without your agreement in writing.

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