Putney & Wood see themselves as one of stone’s best kept secrets, with a profile that doesn’t live up to their portfolio. But they think it’s time they changed that and declared themselves as one of London’s top stone specialists

Barry Putney and Andy Wood know what it’s like to work on the banker and fix stone on site because they have done it – and on some of London’s best known and most prestigious buildings.

That, they believe, gives them an edge when it comes to value engineering. Their hands-on experience enables them to reach solutions that others might not. And nobody is going to pull the wool over their eyes.

“There’s no-one better than us to consult about value engineering because we know what we’re looking at,” says Andy Wood. “And we have a commitment to the industry – I chose to be a mason when I was 16.”

With their premises in Grays, Essex, the two masons are not far geographically from the location of Ashby & Horner where they served their apprenticeships in the 1980s. But they have come a long way since then, picking up the assets of what had become of the company where they started out en route.

Today Putney & Wood employ 40 people directly on site and have 18 more, including themselves and their in-house designers, in their offices.

And they include themselves because although they employ four contract managers for their projects, they are both very much involved in the contracts, Barry dealing with the pre-contract estimating and procurement and Andy picking it up after that. It means clients and their architects and main contractors always have access to a director of the company.

“Everything is in-house now,” says Barry, “from design through to fixing on site. It’s almost like an old-school, traditional type of masonry company.”

And that includes their own works, although they come under the Ashby Stone Interiors business. Ashby are kept as a separate company, largely templating, making and installing kitchen worktops, but they are on the same site. The saws, polishers and CNC machine in the Ashby workshops provide a comfort factor for the specialist contracting of Putney & Wood.

As is common practice, especially in London, the stone fixed by Putney & Wood is normally processed by other companies, often in the country of origin of the stone to avoid transporting waste. But if an especially quick turnaround is needed, or a piece of stone has been damaged during transport, or was not made quite correctly, Ashby give Putney & Wood a fall-back position. It’s what they call their ‘get out of jail card’.

It was useful when they were working at 40 Portman Square. They were producing cladding using 30mm Calacatta Statuary marble to look like a solid, monolithic wall.

Andy says: “It had to be done so carefully and so accurately that rather than keep going to Italy every other week we used the facility here. The architect was actually standing on the slab saying ‘this is the bit we want’ and we were cutting it.”

They have also used their premises for storing and repairing retained stonework before returning it to site, which makes their proximity to London particularly advantageous.

Putney & Wood bought the Ashby assets in 2004 largely for the contracts they had on their books.

By then Ashby were already moving more into interiors. The machinery from their factory in Northfleet was moved to the premises that Putney & Wood had then newly moved into in Grays.

Putney & Wood were established as a company in 1991 after Barry and Andy had worked together as self-employed fixers for three years, labour-only sub-contracting to other major London specialist stone contractors.

As Barry says: “Being a stone mason and working on the banker is a wonderful job, but that’s all you’re ever going to do if you don’t have the ambition to move on.”

Gradually the business grew, with more people being recruited until they had a dozen pairs of fixers working for them. “It’s picking the right team; getting the right people round you,” says Barry.

The team they have built up includes Nick Booroff, who was their first contracts manager already well known in stone circles in London and now managing the Ashby side of the business. There is also Mark Chapman, who had worked with them at Ashby Horner in the ’80s and is now running the drawing office. And most recently came James Drury, their Commercial Director with a background in main contracting. He was senior surveyor with Structuretone before joining Putney & Wood. He says he’s moved over to the ‘dark side’, as he used to call specialist contracting when he represented main contractors.

In 2000 they had made the move from sub-contracting to tendering for their own projects when they sold a share of the company to John Hall’s diverse John F Hunt group.

Barry says: “Over the years of sub-contracting we had been very careful. We had thought about the future and always put money aside for whatever we would need, so we didn’t need money. But John coming in as a shareholder gave us credibility.” Andy adds: “There was a £30million group behind us.”

And it has paid dividends. The first project they won as a specialist contractor in their own right was No1 Pall Mall, Kinnaird House.

It was a £700,000 project involving dismantling and reinstating the top floor, restoration, cleaning and new build in Portland limestone. The architects were Trehearne and the main contractors Kier.

At first Andy and Barry worked in the main offices of the John F Hunt group but as the masonry business grew and developed its own in-house design team it took up an increasing amount of space. When the premises formerly used by a transport company became available on the John F Hunt site at Grays, Putney & Wood moved in there.

Although Putney & Wood was formed in 1991 when construction was in its worse recession since the war, since then the company has benefited from the growth in the industry and has grown by satisfying customers, so they get repeat business and a reputation spread by word of mouth.

“We have been fortunate not to have to look too deep to get work for the sake of it,” says Barry. It has enabled them to be choosy. And they have enough work to guarantee they will be kept busy for the months ahead with projects such as Bond Street, the next phase of Eastbourne Terrace, the £1.4million interiors at Holbrook House and, outside London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a £400,000 stone contract on a house in Hertfordshire. They have always carried out some work outside London, although their main focus is the capital and they say they are trying not to spread too much further.

They say there are projects they are tracking that they feel reasonably confident will go ahead. However, they plan to be more proactive in letting the market know about the projects they have successfully completed and what they have to offer.

To that end they have retained Alan Gayle, formerly Commercial Director with Albion Stone, to develop their marketing strategy, which includes taking CPD presentations to architects and up-dating the website so that the profile of Putney & Wood starts to match the reality.