House N-07
A cantilever over a glazed lower floor, with a basalt core carrying the stair and the flue through every level.
214 m²Area
13 moBuild
All 3Stages
Cast concrete, floor-to-ceiling glazing, a basalt core through every level. Turn the sun and watch the shadows move before a single drawing is issued.
CASTMARK is an architecture studio in Kelbridge. Concept, working documentation and author supervision — quoted per square metre, signed before the first line is drawn.
Every stage is priced per square metre of design area and also sold as a fixed package for small buildings. The rate is fixed at signing and does not move with the site.
Site reading, massing, plans and sections, three volume studies and a daylight check — the stage that decides what the building is.
The set a contractor can build from: structure, envelope, services layout, schedules and the details that decide how the building ages.
We stay on site while it is built: weekly visits, signed inspection reports, and the shop drawings redrawn when reality argues with the set.
What the rate covers. Two rounds of revisions inside each stage, all meetings, and the permit-ready export. Surveys, structural certification and expert review are third-party costs — we quote them in writing before you commit, and we never mark them up.
A 220 m² house runs about fourteen months from the first site walk to the handover. Here is where the time actually goes.
We meet on the plot, read the light, the slope and the neighbours. No fee, no obligation.
Rooms, budget ceiling and the date it has to be finished by, all written down and priced.
Three volumes in 3D, one chosen together, then plans and sections drawn on it.
The buildable set, coordinated with structure and services, issued for permit and tender.
We are on site every week until the last detail is built the way it was drawn.
Larger sites are shown the same way we plan them: the whole block in volume, circling slowly, with each construction phase switched on in turn.
Every window in the model sits on the real 2 m facade grid and the real 3 m floor height, so the massing you approve is the massing that gets drawn. Switch a phase off and you see exactly what the site looks like when the money for it is not there yet.
Before a masterplan goes on paper we walk the district for a week and count what happens where. The result is a live map: pulsing markers for the places that carry the load, figures moving along the routes they actually use.
The busiest crossing in the district and the one the current plan ignores. Four of five pedestrians wait for the full signal, then cross at a run.
Six of the eighty-six. Areas and dates are as built; every one of them went through all three stages with us.
A cantilever over a glazed lower floor, with a basalt core carrying the stair and the flue through every level.
Eighteen apartments dropped into a 9 m gap between two listed brick walls, both of them kept and underpinned.
Six classrooms under one folded roof, built in cross-laminated timber and finished in nine months.
A mixed-use block where the shared plinth does the work: parking below, workshops at street level, homes above.
A 1912 casting hall kept intact and re-lined from inside: a library below, studios on a new steel deck above.
A single-storey clinic planned around daylight: every consulting room faces east, every corridor ends in a window.
CASTMARK started in a foundry loft on Mill Street with two drawing boards and one commission: a house on a slope nobody wanted to build on. It is still standing, and the client still sends photographs every winter.
We work in one room, on one model. The person who draws the node detail is the person who defends it on site, which is why our supervision reports are short and our contractors stop arguing by the second month.
Concrete, timber and glass are what we know best — not as a style, but because we have watched them age in this climate for fourteen years and we know which joints fail first.
Everything on this page — the brand, the projects, the numbers, the people — is invented for a portfolio concept.
Runs the concept stage. Draws in section first and in plan second, and will not be argued out of it.
Owns the working set. Fourteen years of node details and a quiet grudge against untested flashings.
Counts the district before we plan it. Built the activity survey you can click on above.
On site four days a week. Writes the weekly report the same evening, never the morning after.
“They showed us three volumes in 3D on the second meeting, and we killed our own favourite in ten minutes. That saved us a year and about forty thousand.”
“The working set was so complete that our contractor asked two questions in twenty-two months. Two. I have built three times before and I know what that is worth.”
“When the roof detail turned out unbuildable, they redrew it in three days and did not send an invoice for it. That is the whole reason we came back for the second building.”
Second floor of the old casting hall, above the model workshop. Come without an appointment before 17:00 and someone will be at a board.
| Day | Studio hours |
|---|---|
| Monday | 09:00 – 18:00 |
| Tuesday | 09:00 – 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 09:00 – 18:00 |
| Thursday | 09:00 – 18:00 |
| Friday | 09:00 – 18:00 |
| Saturday | 10:00 – 14:00 |
| Sunday | Closed |
The first walk is free and costs you an hour. Send the address, the rough area and what the building is for, and we will come back with a stage plan and a price.
We will confirm by email and bring the zoning map for your plot.
Yes. The concept stage is sold on its own and you own the drawings once it is paid for. We will hand over the model and the PDF set, and we will say plainly which parts still need an engineer before anyone digs. Most clients stay with us for documentation because the set is cheaper to coordinate with the people who drew the concept — but it is not a condition anywhere in the contract.
We find that out at the brief stage, not halfway through the working set. Every concept comes with a cost band from a quantity surveyor we have worked with for nine years. If the band lands above your ceiling, we redraw the massing until it fits or we tell you the plot cannot carry the programme — that conversation is free and we would rather have it in month one.
We prepare and submit the permit set and we answer the authority's questions until it is approved. The fees themselves, plus any structural certification and expert review, are paid directly to those bodies — we quote the expected total in writing before the stage starts and we do not mark it up. Approval times in Kelbridge run six to ten weeks for a private house.
Two full rounds inside each stage, which in fourteen years has been enough for all but a handful of projects. Beyond that we bill at $95 an hour and we tell you before the clock starts, never after. Changes that come from a fault of ours — a mis-measured survey, a detail that will not build — are redrawn free, whenever they surface.