Conservation-grade flooring · The Floor Conservatory · Aislemere & the close · By appointment
Some floors are older than the photograph. They get a gentler trade.
The Conservatory repairs and conserves wood floors in listed buildings — lime-compatible finishes, reversible fixes, reclaimed stock matched under a raking light, and a method statement the heritage officer will actually read. We sand less than anybody you have met, and the number is the pride of the practice.
Every fix reversible · every finish lime-compatible · a method statement travels with every quote
How it goes
The conservation sequence
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
The survey
Raking light, pin meter, patience
The floor is examined at a low raking angle that turns sixty years of wear into a contour map, then metered — boards and joists — and photographed board by board where intervention is proposed. Nothing is decided standing up.
The report
A method statement, not a brochure
The quote travels with a written method: what will be touched, with what, why it is reversible, and what we decline to do. Nine floors in ten need less work than their owners were quoted elsewhere — the report is where that becomes obvious.
The intervention
As little as the floor allows
Board repair from reclaimed stock matched under the raking light, wax fills where a fill is kinder than a board, and pinless metering throughout. No drum sander crosses a conserved floor — plates and pads only, at speeds the finish of 1907 would forgive.
The finish
Breathable, and honest
Lime-compatible oils and waxes that let the boards breathe with the building, tinted only as far as the room’s history supports. The finish serves the floor; nothing is done to make 1890 look like a showroom.
Year five
The reinspection
Every conserved floor is revisited in the fifth year at no charge — metered, raked, and re-photographed against the survey. The building gets a paragraph for its file; we get the only review that matters, from the floor itself.
Services & rates
The conservatory’s card
Prices for buildings in the close and the conservations districts beyond it. The survey fee is credited against any intervention booked within the year, and every quote carries its method statement — the heritage officer’s copy and yours are the same document, which is the entire point of writing it.
Conservation survey & report$260 flat
Raking-light examination, metering, written method statement
Board repair, matchedfrom $28 / board
Reclaimed stock, chosen grain to grain under raking light
Wax & fill intervention$180 / room
Kinder than a board where a fill is the honest fix
Stair nosing, profile copiedfrom $96 / step
The original profile traced and cut in matched hardwood
Clean & nourishing oil$2.35 / sq ft
Full-area lime-compatible wash and feed, no abrasion
The five-year reinspectionno charge
Metered, raked, re-photographed, filed with the building
Three firms quoted to sand the whole nave floor back to bare pine and lacquer it. The Conservatory spent an afternoon on their knees with a lamp, repaired nine boards and a nosing, fed the floor two coats of something that smelled like a beehive, and wrote a report the fabric committee actually understood. The floor has never looked better, which is a different thing from looking new — it is 1743, it is not meant to.
Aislemere & beyond, 2024 — 2026
Rooms in the close
Six conserved floors from the practice’s current files, photographed under the same raking light the surveys used. None of them has been sanded to bare wood; all of them outlived the photographs taken before them.
Who answers the door
The conservator
Ivo Sandhurst served his bench years in his grandfather’s joinery on the close, then spent a decade in building conservation before opening the practice in 2011. He surveys every floor himself, writes every method statement by hand first, and has declined more work than the practice has billed — a ratio he mentions with unhidden satisfaction.
A conserved floor is allowed to look its age. The work is making sure it reaches the next century without pretending it was born yesterday — which is why I spend more evenings on my knees with a lamp than any grown man should admit, and why the practice has never owned a drum sander.
The practice’s rule
Reversible, or we do not do it
Everything the Conservatory does to a floor can be undone by the next conservator without damage — pinned not glued where the building allows, fills that release with heat, finishes that strip without solvents the joists would remember. It is a promise made to a floor’s future, and the heritage officers keep the receipts.
The refusal clause
If the survey finds the floor needs nothing, the report says so and the survey fee is returned. The practice has handed back the fee on one floor in six since 2011 — and slept well every time.
Before the survey
Questions the close asks
The five every listed-building owner arrives with. The survey itself answers the rest — often by finding the floor in better heart than the last tradesman claimed.
Can a listed floor be sanded at all?
Rarely, and never to bare wood on our watch. Most floors sold a “full refinish” need board repair, a feed and a wax — work measured in grams of material removed rather than bags of dust. Where abrasion is justified we use plates and pads at low speed inside sealed containment, and the method statement says exactly how many passes and why.
Solid or engineered for a listed building?
The original is solid and thick-section, and repairs stay solid to match. There is one honest exception — a floor over a modern damp-proofed slab, where a reversible engineered patch in a utility area protects the historic rooms from the wet traffic through them. It is declared in the report as what it is: a modern intervention, signed and dated.
How do you contain the dust on old boards?
The gentlest containment in the trade: room sealed at the door, air moved through HEPA at a whisper rather than a roar, and machines chosen because they make almost no dust in the first place. The fabric committee’s archivist works in the next room on survey days without a complaint on file.
Can you match boards that darkened centuries ago?
Under the raking light, with reclaimed stock from buildings of the same county and decade, and finish tinted in half-steps tested on the floor’s own offcuts. We will not promise the seam invisible from every angle — a two-century-old board has earned a shadow or two, and pretending otherwise is how floors get over-restored.
Why meter an old floor? Wood that old has settled.
The boards have; the building keeps moving. Joists are metered at the survey and again at the reinspection, because a slow rise in moisture under a floor is how death watch beetle and dry rot introduce themselves. The readings go in the building’s file — a floor’s medical record, kept by the practice between owners.
Surveys Tuesdays and Fridays across the close and county · (555) 033-2507 · close@floorconservatory.example
Request the survey
Tell us the building, the floor and whoever else has looked at it. The survey costs $260, credited against any intervention, returned if the floor needs nothing — and the method statement travels with the quote either way. close@floorconservatory.example