Builders in Braunton, specified for salt wind and holiday-let standards.

Braunton grew as a village serving the surrounding farmland and the coast, and today it's a genuine mix: a historic core with narrow lanes and older cob and stone cottages, twentieth-century estate housing filling out the village, and a significant number of properties on the Saunton and Croyde side used as holiday accommodation or second homes. The Burrows and the flood plain to the west set real physical limits on where and how you can build, and the coastal exposure affects every specification decision from render to roof fixings.

The older parts of the village, around Church Street and the lanes near the Caen, hold traditional cob and stone cottages with thatch or slate roofs, many in narrow plots with limited access. Renovation work here follows the same logic as anywhere in North Devon with historic stock: breathable lime finishes rather than cement render, careful structural assessment before opening up cob walls, and joinery matched to existing profiles where the property sits within a conservation area. Getting materials and skips down some of these lanes takes planning, and we build that into the programme rather than assuming a standard delivery will work.

Move towards Saunton and Croyde and the property mix shifts heavily towards holiday lets and second homes: bungalows, chalets and newer coastal builds that get let out for large parts of the year. Work on these properties comes with a different kind of pressure: owners often want renovations, kitchen and bathroom refits or extensions completed inside the off-season window, before the next block of bookings starts, which means realistic programming matters even more than usual. We're straightforward about what can genuinely be finished in a given window rather than promising a date we then have to push back on an owner relying on the booking calendar.

Coastal exposure is the single biggest technical factor in specifying work around Braunton, Saunton and Croyde. Salt-laden wind accelerates the failure of render, timber and metal fixings far faster here than a few miles inland, and it is cheaper to specify properly the first time than to replace work that fails early. That means render systems and paint finishes rated for coastal exposure, stainless or coated fixings rather than standard galvanised where they're exposed to salt air, and roof coverings mechanically fixed against wind uplift that a sheltered inland roof would never experience. Timber joinery on coastal-facing elevations needs a finish schedule that accounts for more frequent maintenance, and we're upfront with clients about that ongoing cost rather than letting a cheap first specification become their problem in three years.

Braunton's low ground, particularly towards the Burrows and the marshes either side of the village, sits on a genuine flood plain, and the water table across parts of the village is high year-round. Any extension or new building work on this lower ground needs finished floor levels, damp-proofing and drainage capacity designed around that reality; we don't treat flood risk as a box-ticking exercise for the planning application, we design the actual detail to cope with it. Surface water drainage and soakaway design also need more care here than on free-draining ground, because water that can't get away quickly enough during a storm has nowhere obvious to go.

Because such a large proportion of property around Braunton, Saunton and Croyde operates as holiday accommodation, finish standards tend to run higher than a typical family home renovation; owners are competing for bookings against similar properties nearby, and a kitchen or bathroom that looks tired shows up in reviews. We price and specify with that commercial reality in mind, without pretending it changes the fundamentals of a well-built extension or a properly tiled bathroom.