It can be quite nice to go back and revisit a project, and reproduce a retrospective. There is one project in particular which comes to mind when thinking about this, it’s a house near Bedford that got Building Tectonics much praise at the time because of the sheer transformation of the house in question. It was a project which we worked on over 10 years ago, but is still a great example of what can be done to a very tired and outdated looking house. Whenever I pass it on the

As pigeons and doves were an important food source throughout history, dovecotes were erected to house the birds. These were kept for their eggs and meat and owning a dovecote was a sign of privilege – for this reason many stately homes and manor houses have dovecotes on their lands. In the Bedford area, Ickwell Bury’s dovecote survived the fire that burnt down the original Georgian mansion and is renowned for its revolving mechanism that allowed ease of access to the nests.

You may have wondered at some point why we call ourselves Building Tectonics. Well, tectonics actually derives from the Greek work ‘tekton’ which means ‘builder’, but in a modern context the word is more often used in relation to the design of the structure. If you were to look ‘tectonics’ up in a dictionary you’d see ‘architectural, relating to a construction or building’ and we adopted the name tectonics because we consider the structure as one of the starting points of des

With two of our main areas of operation being Milton Keynes and Bedford, we find it interesting to look at the differences in the type of work the two areas bring. We know that Milton Keynes has a large quantity of new houses, the town itself was only founded fairly recently in 1967, as opposed to other towns in the UK such as Bedford which is predominantly made up of Victorian buildings. The two areas have buildings which are built-in a very different way. The walls on a Vic