HOME & GARDEN
No ordinary cobblestone y This month has seen me interview Andrew Beeson from Beeson Wright Ltd to uncover the conversion story of Cobblestone Yard, their latest property development and headquarters on Bath Row. Clean, unfussy and raw, it has without doubt broken the traditional mould for listed property development in Stamford and is most certainly a success. Rannveig Stone
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N March 2015 Beeson Wright Ltd undertook the redevelopment of a three-storey derelict listed warehouse and outbuildings based on Bath Row overlooking The Meadows. Over the course of 12 months, business partners Andrew, his wife Joanne and parents in law Neville and Marilyn Wright (being the two sole founders/owners of Peterborough based Kiddicare), jumped at this rare opportunity to develop this iconic structure both sympathetically and dynamically. The largest structure was converted into office space for Beeson Wright Ltd and Marville Properties with a retail unit below and the outbuildings (3 & 4 Cobblestone Yard) are now a two and one bed residential let. “The main building needed under pinning, the stone walls had structural cracks, the floors were rotten, the roof was leaking and windows were missing or boarded up. Fortunately no bats or conservation issues cropped up; however there were a few hundred pigeons to let out!” As a chartered building surveyor, Andrew headed up the project, working with Jon Richards Architectural Design based in Tallington, who has a background history of working with Zaha Hadid in London. Stuart Setchfield from Setchfield Associates in Folksworth was the structural engineer and Paul Ford from Fords of Stamford was the contracts manager. “We did our best to keep the long list of trades and materials sourced locally. By doing so it means we all know each other well and what we all expect from one another, which make communication and delivering on the job so much easier.” RJ Sutton Engineering Ltd in Nassington fabricated the stairs from scratch and installed them. “What we didn’t want was to buy one of these prefabricated kits that wobble and creak as you walk up them. We wanted something that looked industrial, as though it had been there forever and as RJ Suttons undertake a lot of agricultural projects, gantries and jobs for farms I felt they were perfect as I didn’t want anything that looked off the shelf.” The stairs were repositioned to a more
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STAMFORD LIVING JUNE 2016
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