Oak balcony & bridge — St Owen's Cross

Callista and Mansell live at St Owen's Cross, in a house that was once a mill. The kitchen sits in a corner of the building with its floor about a metre above the ground outside, and no door out of it. They spend a great deal of their time in the garden, and the room they used most was the one entirely cut off from it.

The stream that once powered the mill runs immediately past the point where a balcony would go, and most of the garden lies on the far side of it. So the brief had two halves: get out of the kitchen, and get across the water.

A new opening was formed in the kitchen wall for French doors as part of the work.

The balcony stands on four oak posts, with a cantilevered section built into the frame that oversails the wall and the stream. That cantilever is what carries the crossing: the structure over the water is held from the balcony at one end and lands on a stone base on the far bank at the other. Nothing stands in the stream itself.

The crossing is somewhere between a bridge and a staircase, about two and a half to three metres, falling from balcony level down to the garden. Calling it either one undersells what it had to do — work as a staircase while spanning like a bridge.

The balustrade is oak spindles, on the balcony and the crossing alike. Both are decked in composite board.

Designed and built in house, completed April 2023. The frame went up in a day, the spindles and the staircase took a second, and the decking a third — two to three days on site.

The crossing was the awkward part, and not for design reasons. There is no way to install a structure over a stream without getting into it, so we worked in waders, waist-deep, to fix it in place.

Callista and Mansell came back to us in 2026 for an oak frame porch on an outbuilding they are converting on the same property. A second job from the same client, three years on, says more than anything written here.