Harte Stone & Brick restores stone and brick facades across the capital: heritage and conservation projects, period homes and commercial premises.
Every restoration starts with the building's original fabric, matching materials to how it was originally built rather than to whatever is easiest to source.
Thirty years of work with contractors, surveyors and building owners across London, from single stone repairs on a terraced house to full elevations on listed buildings and mansion blocks.
The work is Georgian and Victorian terraces, stucco frontages, mansion blocks, churches, institutional buildings and commercial premises: stone indent repair and replacement, moulding repair, brick repair and tinting, hand-raked lime repointing, stucco and render repair, and conservation cleaning with the TORIK and DOFF systems.
Most elevations need several of those disciplines at once, so the work is assessed as one connected restoration programme rather than a series of isolated repairs.
Three things decide how a facade is treated: what the fabric is, what mortar belongs in it, and how little force is needed to clean it.
We survey the fabric before we specify anything. Mortar samples, brick type, stone bed and the condition behind the face all set the approach. A method that suits a Portland stone frontage will destroy a soft London stock, so nothing is applied by default.
Facade restorationA great deal of London masonry was repointed in hard cement between the sixties and the nineties. It traps moisture, forces it out through the brick face and shears the arrises off. We rake it out by hand and replace it in a lime mortar matched to the original mix and joint profile.
RepointingTORIK and DOFF conservation systems, specified to the substrate and tested on a trial patch first. Superheated low-pressure steam lifts carbon, paint and organic growth without opening the surface of the stone or scouring the mortar out of the joints.
Stone cleaningRecent projects include stone cleaning and repairs at Royal Gate Apartments in Victoria Park, stone and moulding repairs at Lancaster Gate, TORIK cleaning, repointing, HeliBar work and chimney flaunching at Richmond Royal Hospital, and facade restoration at Queen Anne's Gate in Westminster. See the project archive.
We work for main contractors, surveyors, architects, managing agents, freeholders and private owners, across central, north, south west, east and west London and out into the Home Counties. Occupied buildings are phased around the people using them, with scaffold, access and sequencing agreed before work starts.
A few photographs of the facade are usually enough for us to understand the scope.
