Newquay is where we keep the vans. Our base is on Treloggan Road, so when you book a site visit anywhere from Pentire to St Columb Minor, you are getting the shortest call-out we do. It also means we build for this coast the way locals do - assuming salt in the air, wind at the gable and rain that arrives horizontally a few times each winter.
The town gives us plenty to work with. Cornwall's largest settlement has grown by roughly a quarter since the turn of the century, and its houses - resort-era terraces, whole neighbourhoods of bungalows, new streets rising at Nansledan - hold more unused space than almost anywhere we cover. We turn that space into bedrooms, offices and annexes. You deal with one team from the first measurement to the last coat of paint, and the quote you sign is the figure you pay - VAT in, exclusions listed.
Tell us what you are thinking and we will come and look at it. No charge, and no obligation to go ahead.
Half an hour, no charge, and a straight answer on whether the space works.
Steels, floors and bearings are our own work, not a subcontractor's problem.
Full Plans submitted to Cornwall Council, completion certificate at the end.
Same people from first survey to final walk-round. Nobody to chase.
Newquay's housing tells its history in rings. The core near the harbour and the town beaches is the railway-boom town: villas, terraces and one-time hotels thrown up after 1876, when the Great Western line turned a china-clay port into a holiday resort. Around that sits the twentieth century - bungalows and family estates spreading toward Porth, Treloggan and St Columb Minor. And on the eastern edge, Nansledan is adding a whole new district in traditional Cornish style, with well over 800 homes finished and thousands more to come on the Duchy of Cornwall's land.
Each ring converts differently. The resort-era buildings have big, steep roofs and older structure that deserves respect. The bungalow belts are the easiest wins in town - a hip to gable and a dormer can nearly double one's usable space. Nansledan homes come with a design code that shapes what outside alterations can look like. We work across all three every month, from a base that sits in the middle of them.
Three ways to get the space without leaving the postcode - chosen by what your house is, not by what a brochure says.
From resort-era terraces near the beaches to the bungalow belts further back, Newquay roofs hide serious floor area. We build the structure for Atlantic weather - clad cheeks, marine fixings, ventilation that assumes sideways rain - because half a mile from the sea, that is not optional.
Learn more about loft conversions in Cornwall
Newquay's twentieth-century estates came with garages, and Newquay's twenty-first-century car sizes mean almost nobody parks in them. A converted one makes a warm office, gym or fourth bedroom - and it is the cheapest habitable space money buys in this town.
Learn more about garage conversions in Cornwall
A town that grew by a quarter in twenty years is a town where family struggles to buy nearby. An annexe keeps parents or adult kids close, on your own plot - and we walk you through the council tax banding and VAT questions before a single block is laid.
Learn more about annexes & granny flats in CornwallSome of it is arithmetic, some of it is geography, and one part of it is simply that we live here too.
Our base is on Treloggan Road, which makes Newquay jobs the shortest commute we have. Site visits happen fast, the team is never far away, and the aftercare promise is easy to keep when the job is ten minutes from the yard.
The railway arrived in 1876 and turned Newquay into a resort almost overnight - and the Victorian and Edwardian building boom that followed used steep, roomy roofs. A century on, those roofs are the cheapest bedrooms in town, waiting above ceilings from Mount Wise to St Columb Minor.
Newquay's built-up area grew from around 19,600 people in 2001 to over 24,500 by 2021 - among the fastest growth in Cornwall - and it is now the county's largest settlement. When a town fills up that quickly, making an existing house bigger beats fighting the market for a scarce bigger one.
In the villages around Newquay, holiday lets outnumber long-term rentals by an absurd margin. For owners in that market, one extra en-suite bedroom in the loft changes the guest count, the nightly rate and the shoulder-season bookings all at once.
An Edwardian villa near Trenance, a 1970s bungalow at Porth, a Duchy home at Nansledan with its own design code - each needs different structural thinking and different paperwork. We carry all three conversations, because we have them here every week.
The sequence below is the same one we run everywhere - but on this coast, stage five and six carry extra detailing decisions that inland jobs never see. They are priced and specified up front, not improvised on the scaffold.
We measure the head height from the top of the ceiling joist to the underside of the ridge, look at how the roof is built, and work out where a staircase can physically land. On a garage we check the floor level, the damp course and how the walls were built. This is the visit that decides whether the job is worth doing at all, and we would rather tell you no at this stage than three weeks in.
One document, VAT included, with the structural allowance shown as its own line rather than buried. Where a wall has to be opened up before anyone can be certain what the steel is bearing onto, we say so and give you the range. Exclusions are listed. If your quote from someone else has no structural line on it, that cost has not gone away.
We check whether your permitted development rights survive. Dormers are not permitted development on article 2(3) land, which in Cornwall means every conservation area, the National Landscape and all ten areas of the Mining World Heritage Site. Rooflights usually still are. Getting this right at the start is the difference between a four-week start and a four-month one.
Architectural drawings, then a structural engineer sizes the beams and specifies the bearings. We submit Full Plans to Cornwall Council rather than a Building Notice - it costs less in every fee band and it means the details are agreed before anyone cuts anything, instead of being argued about on site.
Scaffold where the work needs it, then the load-bearing stage: new floor joists sized for a habitable floor rather than a storage loft, steels in, padstones and spreaders bedded properly. On older Cornish stone walls this is where surprises live, which is why it happens early and why we look before we price.
Roof made good, dormer or rooflights in, windows glazed. Once the space is dry it is insulation, electrics, plumbing and the stair. Insulation is worth paying attention to here - the limits for a conversion are tighter than for a new-build house, 0.15 on the roof against 0.16, which catches a lot of people out.
Skim, decorate, doors, sockets, flooring. Then the building control final inspection and your completion certificate, the electrical certificate, and the written structural warranty. We walk the room with you before we take the scaffold down, not after.
Bungalows keep us busier in Newquay than any other kind of house - and the most common thing we hear at a bungalow site visit is some version of 'we had no idea the roof was this big'.
Salt air is a slow, patient test of workmanship - it finds cheap fixings and lazy details years after the invoice. Our warranty runs for a decade because the materials and details we specify are chosen for this coast, not for a catalogue.
The warranty covers the part we control: the structure. Beams sized and signed off by an engineer, bearings that are capable of taking the load, floors that meet their span, and a roof that stays weathertight where we have opened it up. It is written down and handed over with the building control completion certificate at the end of the job, not promised verbally on the doorstep at the start of it.
It matters more here than it would upcountry. A lot of Cornish walls are random rubble stone rather than cavity brickwork, and Eurocode 6, the masonry design standard, explicitly does not cover rubble masonry. There is no code route for dropping a steel onto a wall like that. It has to be justified by an engineer from first principles, which is exactly why we open up and look before we price, rather than after.
If the surf is the reason you came, these are the reasons people stay.
England's most famous surfing beach, and the venue that made Newquay the sport's UK capital. Consistent Atlantic swell, board hire and surf schools on the sand, and the Pentire headland framing it all at the western edge of town.
Learn more about Fistral Beach (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
Tucked into the leafy Trenance valley, the zoo keeps more than 130 species - red pandas, penguins, meerkats and lemurs among them - in 13 acres of gardens. An easy half-day that has been a fixture of the town for over fifty years.
Learn more about Newquay Zoo (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
On the seafront above Towan Beach, with an underwater tunnel that puts the Atlantic's residents overhead - from native Cornish species to tropical reef life. The wet-weather card every Newquay household keeps up its sleeve.
Learn more about Blue Reef Aquarium (opens Google Maps in a new tab)Conversions across mid and north Cornwall, from Victorian terraces in Truro to bungalows on the coast road.
We had been told twice that our roof pitch was too shallow for a loft. The survey here came back the same, but with an actual option - a rear dormer to buy back the headroom over the stair. They measured 1.9m at the centre of the flight and showed us where that sat against the regs before we spent anything. Two bedrooms and a shower room now.
Ours is an old miner's terrace and the walls are random rubble, not cavity. They were straight with us that the steel bearings would need opening up before anyone could price it properly, and they got the engineer out first rather than guessing. Cost more than a modern semi would have, but nothing on the quote changed from start to finish.
We're inside the mining World Heritage Site so a dormer was never going to fly. They knew that on the first visit and steered us to conservation rooflights instead, which kept us out of a planning application altogether. The slate was matched properly too - you cannot tell where the new work stops.
Integral garage into a snug and a utility. What sold me was that they explained the floor build-up - the damp membrane, the insulation, why the finished floor ends up a couple of inches higher than the hall. Every other quote just said 'convert garage'. Warm room, no condensation, and it was done in under four weeks.
Terraced house on a hill, so the scaffold had to go on the pavement. They sorted the licence with Cornwall Council and gave us the two-week lead time up front instead of turning up and discovering it. Small thing but it tells you how the rest of the job went.
A proper annexe for my mum, and honest advice on the bits I would never have thought about - that the council tax discount depends on who lives there, and that a planning condition tying it to the main house would knock out the reduced VAT rate. They flagged it before we committed rather than after.
Working from Treloggan Road means zero travel loading on a Newquay quote. Guide ranges before VAT: single garage conversions £15,000 to £20,000, rooflight lofts £30,000 to £45,000, dormers £45,000 to £75,000, hip to gable £55,000 to £85,000. Coastal detailing - clad cheeks, upgraded fixings - is itemised where your exposure genuinely calls for it, and the free site visit settles which figures apply to your roof.
Newquay is home base, and every town below sits within our working circle around Wadebridge. Same team, same written quote, whichever name on this list is yours.
If your house is in Newquay, we are already nearby. Half an hour of looking and measuring, free, and you will know whether the loft or the garage is the smarter move - and what either would cost, in writing.
