The workshop
Unit 10a, Llandow.
A workshop on the Vale Business Park, ten minutes from Cowbridge and a few miles from the Heritage Coast. Everything we make is cut here.
Why it matters
A workshop, not a van.
Most joinery sold as bespoke around here is cut on site off a chop saw, in whatever weather the day gives you. We cut dry, indoors, off a scribing floor, with machinery, racking, a forklift, a CNC and a laser. Then we bring the finished frame to you.
It changes three things. Tolerances get tighter, because a workshop bench doesn't move and a trestle in a wet garden does. Lead times get more honest, because rain stops site work and it doesn't stop us. And your garden stays yours until the week the frame arrives.
The scribing floor
Every frame is drawn out full size before a single joint is cut.
The plywood in that photograph is the scribing floor. Frames get set out on it at full scale — every post, every brace, every joint, drawn one to one. The overlapping lines are years of other people's buildings.
It's how you find out that a brace won't land where the drawing says before you cut £400 of oak, and it's how curved members get shaped: you lay the timber on the line and mark it off the drawing itself. Nothing on a screen replaces it.
Behind the name
Ben West.
Vale Coast Carpentry is a trading name of the same company that has spent years designing and building climbing and bouldering walls — engineered timber structures that carry real loads, take daily punishment, and have to be inspected and signed off before anyone touches them.
That background is why "will this still be square in thirty years" is a straightforward question here, and why we're comfortable working under building control on buildings that most garden room companies deliberately keep small enough to avoid it.
The ammonite in the logo comes out of the Blue Lias cliffs a few miles down the road — the same coast the workshop is named after.
- Workshop
- Unit 10a, Vale Business Park, Llandow, Cowbridge, CF71 7PF
- Hours
- Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm
- Machinery
- Racking, forklift, CNC and laser, plus a scribing floor
- Working area
- Vale of Glamorgan, Bridgend and Cardiff. Engraved oak posted UK-wide
- Insurance
- Public and products liability £5m · Employers' liability £10m · Professional indemnity
- Visits
- By arrangement — call first, we're often on site
Come and see the workshop.
If you're within reach of Llandow and you want to see oak being cut before you commit to any, ring first and come over.