Fairhaven of Anglesey Abbey Ltd, the company established by Lady Fairhaven in conjunction with former Rattee & Kett head carver Tim Crawley in 1999, has joined forces with AJ Woods to become Fairhaven & Woods Ltd.

They celebrated the union with a party at Fairhaven’s workshops and offices in Bottisham, Cambridgeshire, attended by the 26 staff of the two companies and 60 guests including representatives of suppliers, customers, the county council and English Heritage.

AJ Woods in Norwich were already part of the Fairhaven group, having been bought from Rattee & Kett in 2006, but had traded separately.

In January this year Lady Fairhaven of Anglesey Abbey, whose husband’s baronial title is used by the stonemasonry company, recruited Gary Smith, a former director of Woods who now runs his own business, to be general manager. Gary’s company has brought £300,000 worth of work to Fairhaven & Woods and is currently looking at three other new build, high quality stone houses to develop.

Gary and Lady Fairhaven sat down over a cup of coffee in January to dicsuss the Fairhaven businesses. Gary says: “It seemed entirely logical to me to merge the two companies.”

He says there was some element of duplication in the two companies that could be avoided by joining them together but, perhaps more importantly, it produced a whole greater than the sum of its two parts to enable Fairhaven & Woods to be able to tender for projects that would have been considered too big for either individually.

The merger took place at the beginning of October and Gary says that in the following two weeks they had tendered for £2.1million worth of work. “It’s really paying off,” he told NSS.

He says he was attracted by the philosophy of the business that puts quality first and never lets customers down. “Regardless of the wokload, we won’t compromise on quality,” says Gary.

The objective of Fairhaven & Woods is to bring together the art of stonecarving, the craft of masonry and the science of conservation to provide an integrated approach to the preservation of existing buildings of quality and the creation of new buildings that require the skills of traditional craftsmen.

“Although we are a specialist company, we also have the management resources and experience to act as main contractors,” says Gary. They will serve East Anglia, London and the Home Counties, and East Midlands.