Padstow property is a paradox: the most valuable houses in our patch, with the least room to grow. The old town's cottages are locked together around the harbour, the conservation area has covered them since 1974, and the planning here is watched more closely than anywhere else we work. Getting more space out of a Padstow house is a craft, and it is one we practise a lot.
We convert lofts under conservation rooflights, open garages into bedrooms and utilities on the newer streets, and build annexes for families the market has priced apart. Survey, structural design, the Cornwall Council paperwork and the fit-out come from one local team - and because we are based in Newquay and our phone code is Padstow's own 01841, the site visit is days away, not weeks.
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.
The Padstow everyone photographs is the old one: fishermen's cottages and merchants' houses stacked around the harbour and up the western bank of the Camel estuary, on lanes that were laid out for handcarts. Church Street alone carries a string of Grade II listings. This Padstow has glorious roofs and awkward everything else - no rear access, no parking, party walls both sides, and a conservation area boundary drawn around the whole performance.
The other Padstow sits uphill: modern terraces and family homes at Sarah's View, Dennis Road and out toward Trecerus, built with driveways, garages and gardens. The two need entirely different handling. Downhill is conservation rooflights, slate matching and scaffold licences; uphill is straightforward permitted development, faster programmes and lower cost per square metre. We quote each for what it actually is.
The building decides the route more than the owner does - and in Padstow the buildings range across five centuries.
In the old town, a loft is often the only direction a cottage can grow - the neighbours are attached on both sides and the courtyard is the size of a tablecloth. Conservation rooflights keep most of these jobs out of the planning system; where a dormer is worth pursuing, we design it to pass.
Learn more about loft conversions in Cornwall
Garages mostly belong to Padstow's newer edges - Sarah's View, the Trecerus side, Dennis Road - where the streets are wider and the planning simpler. Converting one adds a bedroom or utility for a fraction of what any extra square metre otherwise costs in this postcode.
Learn more about garage conversions in Cornwall
At Padstow prices, the next generation cannot buy nearby - the town's own neighbourhood plan now restricts new-builds to principal residences for exactly that reason. An annexe inside your existing footprint houses family without fighting the market.
Learn more about annexes & granny flats in Cornwall
Building in Padstow costs more care than building almost anywhere else in Cornwall. These are the reasons owners keep deciding it is worth taking.
An average sold price around £498,000 makes Padstow the dearest town we cover, and floor area is the scarcest thing in it. Converting roof space or a garage adds the square metres the market values most highly, on land you have already paid for.
Terraced cottages, shared walls, no gardens to speak of and a conservation area over the lot - a conventional extension is a non-starter for most of central Padstow. Up or inward is the game, which is precisely what loft and garage conversions are.
A cottage that sleeps six books differently from one that sleeps four. For the many Padstow houses that earn as holiday lets, an extra en-suite loft bedroom changes the weekly rate and the occupancy, and the sums usually come back over a handful of seasons.
Padstow roofs are slate, often old, and the fastest way to ruin a conservation-area streetscape is a clumsy patch in the wrong material. We match slate properly - this is the county that still quarries it at Delabole, twenty minutes away - and detail new openings so they read as part of the roof.
Nobody wants scaffolding on the quay in August. Where a house trades through the summer we programme structural work for the shoulder months, agree delivery windows that respect the neighbours, and keep the site tight - because on these streets there is nowhere to sprawl.
A noticeable share of our Padstow enquiries come from owners who live half the year somewhere else - which is why photographed progress updates and off-season programming became standard practice for us long ago.
Seven stages, with the awkward questions - access, licences, conservation constraints - answered at stage one rather than discovered at stage five. On these streets, the planning of the job matters as much as the building of it.
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.
A guarantee matters more when the owner is two hundred miles away for half the year. Ours is written down, handed over with the completion certificate, and honoured by a team that works within sight of the estuary every month of the year.
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.
The town's pull is not a mystery. If you are new here, or thinking about being here more, start with these.
A proper working port at the centre of the town - fishing boats landing catch, the Rock ferry shuttling across the estuary, and the inner basin held calm behind its tide gate while the Camel drains to sandbanks twice a day.
Learn more about Padstow Harbour (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
A conservation charity on the harbourside that rears thousands of baby lobsters from eggs and releases them around the Cornish coast. Small, genuinely interesting, and open daily - the tanks of week-old lobsters convert even reluctant visitors.
Learn more about National Lobster Hatchery (opens Google Maps in a new tab)
Padstow is the seaward end of Cornwall's most popular trail - just over five level, traffic-free miles beside the estuary to Wadebridge on the old railway line, and on toward Bodmin beyond it. Hire a bike by the old station and the whole estuary opens up.
Learn more about The Camel Trail (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.
Expect the same base ranges as anywhere in our patch - garages from about £15,000, rooflight lofts from about £30,000, dormers from £45,000 before VAT - plus whatever the specific house genuinely adds: a highway scaffold licence, slate matching, conservation detailing. Those extras appear as named lines in the written quote, not as surprises in month two. The site visit that produces the quote costs nothing.
Padstow sits five miles from our centre point at Wadebridge, so it shares one team with every town below. Wherever your property is on this list, the same people answer the phone.
Whether it is a cottage two lanes from the harbour or a family house up at Sarah's View, the first step is the same free visit - and you will leave it knowing what is possible, what the conservation area means for you, and what it would honestly cost.
