A timber house just after sunset, tall glazing glowing with the rooms behind it.

Most of the work is deciding what to leave out.

Aldren takes on houses and the parts of them nobody photographs: stair nosings, door handles, the exact height of a windowsill.

A sitting room stripped back, lit by nothing but its windows.

A house is a sequence of rooms you walk through, and we spend most of our time on the walking.

Drawings for Builders

We produce buildable drawings for new-builds and extensions: structure that holds, fabric that performs, and openings placed where the daylight is worth catching. Every set is coordinated with the engineer before it reaches site.

Layout & Circulation

Before anything is chosen, the plan is settled: where walls fall, how rooms are entered, which surfaces stay fixed. We work out the route through a house first and the palette second, so the finish reads as a consequence, not a rescue.

Built-In Joinery

A quiet room still needs somewhere to put things. We draw built-in joinery, shelving, and loose pieces to the millimetre of the space they sit in, then have them made by two workshops we have used for nine years.

Renovation & Reuse

Older plans rarely fail because they are old; they fail because rooms were added without a route. We take the layout back, keep the walls and windows worth keeping, and remove the rest until the space reads in one move.

Four habits hold every project together.

Considered drawing, quiet sites, honest cost and rooms that age well.

Restraint

We remove until every line has a job.

Sculptural ceramic vessel on a timber shelf

Daylight

Openings follow the light a room receives, not symmetry outside.

Reader beside a sunlit wall of warm timber

Proportion

Plans, joinery and thresholds share one set of dimensions.

Stone plinth, vessel and armchair in measured alignment

Endurance

Materials are chosen for repair, patina and the years after handover.

Dark timber study with daylight filtered through blinds