Kitchens and fitted furniture in Carlisle.

Carlisle is a red sandstone city, and the houses show it. Stanwix, Denton Holme and the terraces off Warwick Road were built between the 1870s and the 1900s: tall ceilings, chimney breasts still in place, bay windows, and back walls that have moved a little in a hundred and fifty years. Add the interwar semis at Belah and Morton and the newer estates at Carlisle's edges, and almost every kitchen we are asked to look at in the city is a room that a standard run of units does not fit without a fight.

We are four miles from the city and it is where most of our work comes from. A Victorian terrace usually wants the chimney breast worked around rather than ripped out, and a larder built into the alcove beside it. A 1930s semi usually wants the back wall opened up and the kitchen treated as one room with the dining space, which is a job for furniture drawn to the room rather than bought in modules.