A Gate to Match the Corrugated Fence

This one started at home. Simon's mother wanted a gate for the side of the house, and the run beside it was already clad in old corrugated sheet — the sort that's been there long enough to earn its place. Nothing off a shelf was ever going to sit right against a fence like that, so he drew the whole thing himself: a pattern of reeds and bulrushes to answer the ripple of the corrugation, and a rose arch over the top for good measure.

The metalwork he designed and welded in the workshop, shaping and joining the bars by hand until the reeds stood the way he wanted them. But a gate needs more than steel to hang true. He milled and jointed a timber base from our own chestnut to carry it, cut so it slides down into the concrete posts and sits square without any packing or fuss. Wood and metal, made in the same building, on the same afternoon — that's the whole point of us. The rose arch went up as a cleft-and-braced pergola, mortised at the joints, ready for a climber to take it over.

If it's right for your own mum's side gate, it's right for anyone.

It's become our proof piece. When someone asks whether we really do both trades under one roof, this is the gate we point to. The metal patterning is Simon's own hand, the timberwork is milled from a tree we felled, and the rose arch ties it to the garden it lives in. It matches a fence nobody else would have bothered to match.

If you've an odd run to work with, or a gate that needs to belong to what's already there, that's exactly the kind of thing we like to make.