Painters & Decorators in Letchworth Garden City

Letchworth Garden City was laid out in the early 1900s as the first garden city, and much of the original town still looks the way its planners intended. Around the Broadway, Norton Common and the older streets you'll find Arts and Crafts cottages with roughcast render, steep tiled roofs and small-paned casement windows. Further out, Jackmans, Grange and Lordship are mostly post-war and later housing, which is more straightforward to decorate.

The rendered houses are where the care goes. Roughcast holds dirt and old flaking paint in its texture, so it has to be washed down and brushed back properly, and any cracks filled, before masonry paint goes on. The timber casements and doors on these cottages usually carry many layers of old paint, and they last far longer when they're cut back and primed rather than glossed over again.

Before changing anything outside, check with the Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation. Many homes in the town are covered by its Scheme of Management, and changing external colours or painting brickwork that has never been painted can need the Foundation's consent. A like-for-like repaint in the existing colours is usually simpler. We're happy to talk it through when we look at the job, and inside the house there's no such question.

Letchworth also has a large amount of business premises, from town-centre shops and offices to the industrial estates. We take on commercial and industrial decorating as well as homes, planned around your working hours. At about nineteen miles from our Broxbourne base it's towards the edge of our usual area, so we plan Letchworth jobs as full working days rather than short visits.