Building your dream with Oakwrights

Owning a house is a dream for almost everyone. But why stop at just buying a place? You can really make a house your own by creating a beautiful timber-framed extension, garden room or outbuilding — and if you're really ambitious, the dream of creating your own house from scratch can be done more easily than you might think.

Anyone who has dreams like these needs to know the name of a fellow dreamer: Tim Crump, the founder of Oakwrights. Tim was building elaborate timber dens during his childhood in Herefordshire before he even left school, and he turned it into his livelihood over a quarter of a century ago.

Today, Tim still runs the company that he set up in 1999, and the firm has since grown to employ almost 150 craftspeople, architects and designers. All are committed to helping others realise their dreams, from modest extensions to entire timber houses built from scratch — and all with the very finest oak.

It’s for good reason that oak has been used for home construction for countless centuries. It’s enormously strong, of course, yet brings warmth and cosiness to any space, and only looks better with age. While medieval builders prized such qualities, from a 21^st century perspective it’s an even better choice than many modern materials, being a great sustainable choice. ‘While oak is growing, it absorbs CO2 that it retains for as long as the building stands – often for centuries,’ Tim explained to Country Life. ‘This makes oak one of the most environmentally friendly building materials available. Green oak harvested from a sustainable source is effectively carbon neutral.’ Compare oak to the alternative, and that benefit only increases: a single cubic metre of oak used as an alternative to non-sustainable building materials can save 0.8 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Using an ancient material doesn’t mean that you’ll be left with ancient techniques, though. Oakwrights have continually pushed their expertise and technology to blend heritage and sustainability: the company’s WrightWall and WrightRoof panels, for example, are designed specifically to wrap seamlessly around the timber frames to make perfect, airtight insulation.

With such innovations they’ve helped countless clients create highly energy efficient and sustainable houses and outbuildings, and in 2017 became the first company in the UK to earn official Passivhaus certification for an oak-framed building. And all while using a material which will look as good in 50 years as it does the day that work has finished — if not even better.

Speaking of appearances, the design work that Oakwrights put in to the creation of their projects is just as much a part of the process as the materials. As well as carpenters and craftsman, Oakwrights have a team of architects, designers and project managers who work closely with clients throughout the build to make sure that all their dreams are realised. The company has many testimonials from happy customers, but the words of two of them, Mark and Sarah Firth, say it all: ‘We were blown away.’

How do you get started on your own project? First up, visit the Oakwrights website and order their brochures; they have a series of different options, depending on whether you’re looking to build an extension, an outbuilding, or even or self-build your own oak-frame home.

After that, you can find out even more and meet some of the team by heading along to one of the Oakwrights open days, or see them at an event: as well as their Herefordshire base, this year you’ll be able to see them in London, Glasgow, Somerset and Warwickshire, among others.

So what are you waiting for? Your oak-framed dream is calling.

Find out more at oakwrights.co.uk