How We Work.
One team from the first conversation to the final handover. This is how a Huxley home gets built, and where the way we build it came from.
01
The conversation
Every project starts with a conversation. Tell us what you’re picturing and where you’re building, and we’ll tell you honestly what it will take. Private clients, developers, investors: if it’s a home worth building properly, we’re interested.
02
Drawings and design
Bring your architect’s drawings, or nothing but an idea. Design, architecture and build sit under one roof, so nothing gets lost between the drawing and the site.
03
The price
Our in-house quantity surveyor prices the work before we start, so you always know where the money goes. No surprises, no drift.
04
The build
We take on a small number of projects a year and never overstretch. The trades are cherry-picked over years, closer to family than workforce, and Rafe is on site, every site, every week. You follow it all in the Huxley portal: photos from site, progress, decisions and costs in one place.
05
Handover and beyond
We hand over when it’s right, not when it’s convenient. Every home leaves us with a 10-year structural guarantee and two years of maintenance as standard.
WHERE IT STARTED
Built into the family.
My grandfather was a builder. My father was a builder. From the age of eight I spent weekends and school summers on his sites, and the day I left school I went straight into the trade.
At eighteen I went to work for a Portsmouth builder who ran forty men. I started at the bottom again, as a labourer, and got the kind of one-to-one apprenticeship you can’t buy: how plumbing works, how electrics work, the stages of a build, and how to run trades, clients and problems all in the same morning. I soaked up every minute of it.
The truth is it started long before that. I was raised mostly by my grandmother, and I was the kid who took everything apart just to see how it went back together. Lego first, then houses.
From twenty-two I was out on my own, building homes across the UK. These days the work takes us further: the Channel Islands and beyond, for clients who want British craftsmanship wherever they’re building.
Huxley is run the way I was taught. A small number of projects a year, never overstretched, built with people I trust completely. I tried commercial work once; the money was fine, but there was nothing to stand back and look at. Homes are different. At the end you stand there and think: we built that. And someone gets to live in it for generations.
Rafe Philpott
Director
Have a home in mind?
