Restoration and matching old woodwork

A good deal of this workshop's work is not new work at all. Something in an older building has failed - a panel has split along the grain, a section of cresting has come away, water has got behind a run of moulding, half the balusters on a stair have gone - and the job is to put back a piece that nobody afterwards can pick out.

That is a harder brief than making the thing new, because the target is not a drawing, it is the piece next to it. Four things have to agree: the profile, the depth of the relief, the margin around the carving, and the polish. Get three right and miss the fourth and the repair still announces itself from across the nave. So we work from a physical sample where one can be taken down, and from close photographs with a rule or a coin in the frame where it cannot, and we cut a trial piece and hold it against the original before committing to the run.

This is also where machining genuinely helps rather than hurts. An original run of ornament was carved by hand and is therefore slightly irregular; what matters is that the new pieces sit inside that same range rather than being visibly crisper than everything around them. Machining gets the profile and the depth exactly right, and the hand work afterwards is what softens the new piece into its neighbours. Everything is done at the workshop and only fitted on site, around your Mass timings or the family's day.