Halewell is a bath studio in Ardwell. We work from an interior designer’s drawings or from our own, we are the only trade in the house, and we are out in three to five weeks. Ensuites from $18,000, family bathrooms from $26,000, wet rooms from $34,000.
Next start is fourteen weeks away. Four of next year’s twelve are still open.
Lic. #000000
Master plumber, licensed (sample number)
$2m
Public liability, and insured to work in occupied homes
138
Bathrooms finished since 2014, twelve a year
5 years
On our workmanship, with the maker’s warranty handled by us
I first-fixed for a housebuilder for nine years, which is nine years of burying pipework that somebody else then covered in tile and took the credit for. In 2014 I stopped taking anything except bathrooms, and Halewell has done nothing else since.
Twelve a year is not modesty, it is arithmetic. A bathroom takes three to five weeks, I am on every one of them from the strip out to the last bead of silicone, and there are fifty working weeks in a year once August is out. If you want thirty bathrooms a year you need a second team, and then you are selling somebody else’s work.
Every room we finish is photographed properly, on the Tuesday after handover, before anybody puts a toothbrush on the shelf. That is the only reason we have anything to show you, and it is why the price on this page is not a secret.
Nesta Tarrant, master plumber. Lic. #000000 (sample)
Prices are the bottom of the band at the clean finish level, walls staying where they are. The configurator below moves them.
A shower, a basin and a WC in a room you can touch both walls of. Every millimetre is drawn before anything is ordered, because in a room this size a 12mm error is the whole door swing.
What decides the price: Where the soil stack is, and whether the shower can drain without lifting the floor.
A bath, a separate shower if the room takes one, and storage that holds four people’s things. This is the room that has to survive fifteen years of wet towels, so it is built for that first.
What decides the price: Whether the bath and the shower can share a wall, and what the floor is made of.
No tray, no step, a floor that falls 1:60 to a linear drain, and tanking taken 200mm past every splash line. The expensive part is under the tile and you will never see it.
What decides the price: The joist depth, because a level floor means cutting into it or building the room up.
A bathroom three floors from the stack, under a roof slope, usually with a pump and always with a head-height argument. We survey the roof timbers before we quote, not after.
What decides the price: Pressure at the top of the house, and whether a pump and its noise can be hidden.
Boilers and heating systems
We will move a radiator inside the bathroom and nothing beyond the door. For the rest we will give you two names.
Kitchens
The same trades, a different animal. We tried it twice in 2017 and we were not good at it.
Emergency call-outs
If a ceiling is coming down at eleven at night, we are the wrong number and we will say so in one sentence.
Supply only
We do not sell tile or brassware for somebody else to fit. What we buy, we install and we warrant.
Sites with five other trades on them
We work alone in the house or we do not work. Sharing a bathroom with a builder’s programme is how snagging lists get written.
These are the bands our last thirty-eight bathrooms actually landed in. The survey turns a band into one fixed number, and the photograph is a room we built to the spec you have chosen.
Sennet Row, Ardwell. Five weeks, with the old lath and plaster ceiling replaced first.
Family bathroom, considered finish
$31,500 to $39,000
Everything in: labour, tile, brassware, joinery, waste and the skip. Not the survey fee, which is $450 and comes off the first invoice.
On site
4 to 5 weeks
One team, every day, until it is finished. We do not start a second job halfway through yours.
What moves the number in this room: Whether the bath and the shower can share a wall, and what the floor is made of.
Book a survey for this roomOne van, one team, and a rule that nobody leaves home before half six. That is what sets the map, not a radius drawn on a website.
Half of what we build. The only town where we will still come back for a past client and spend a day on one tap.
Victorian terraces. Expect lath and plaster, a soil stack in the wrong wall, and joists running the unhelpful way.
Houses from the last thirty years. Plasterboard and trusses, which is quick, and low mains pressure upstairs, which is not.
Mill conversions on concrete floors. A wet room here means building the floor up, never cutting it down.
Two jobs a year, and we start them between May and September because the lane below the green floods.
The furthest we go. If there is no parking within thirty yards of the door, add a week and we will say so on survey day.
Outside those six, ask anyway. If the drawings come from someone we have built with before, we usually travel.
Roughly two thirds of our bathrooms come through an interior designer or an architect. We do not resent that, we prefer it. Somebody has already argued about the layout, and we get to argue about the services instead.
Nettlefold Architects
Ardwell. Eleven bathrooms since 2017.
Thorne & Pye Interiors
Pargeter Green. Nine since 2019.
Rafferty Byrne Architects
Lintwell. Four, all conversions.
Sample practice names, invented for this concept site.
Every one photographed on the Tuesday after handover. No staging, no borrowed towels, and the budget printed next to it.
The soil stack ran through the only wall that could carry a wall-hung basin. We moved the stack into the landing cupboard and lost four inches off a wardrobe. The client agreed to that on survey day, which is the only day anyone is calm about losing four inches.
Merrick had drawn a 1.8m bath under a window with a sill at 900mm, which meant tiling into a reveal at head height. We dropped the sill instead of the bath. That is a lintel, two days of Rowan’s time and a building control notice, and the room is better for it.
An 1890s mill floor is concrete on steel and you do not cut into it for a drain. We built the room up 110mm, rehung the door short, and took the waste out through a flue that had not drawn smoke since 1974.
Mains pressure three floors up was 0.9 bar, which is a dribble. The pump fixed that and then hummed through the bedroom ceiling below. We rebuilt its housing in 18mm ply on acoustic mat. Now you can hear the extractor and not the pump.
I have specified four bathrooms with Halewell and I have never had to draw the tile setting-out, because Nesta sends one back to me before I ask. That is not normal, and it is why they get the difficult rooms.
Rowan Nettlefold
Nettlefold Architects, Ardwell
They are expensive, and they will not start until every box is in their unit, which clients hear as slow. I have stopped apologising for either. Nothing has come back on a Halewell room in seven years.
Merrick Thorne
Thorne & Pye Interiors
Five weeks without a bathroom, two children, and I had braced for all of it. What I had not braced for was the landing being hoovered every evening and the shower working on the Friday they said it would.
Frances Ovington
Sennet Row, Ardwell
Sample reviews, written for this concept site.
Three of the six happen before anyone touches your house, which is why the ones that do are short.
90 minutes, $450
Nesta lifts a board, finds the stack, checks the pressure at the highest tap and measures the room to the millimetre. The fee comes off your first invoice, and you keep the drawing either way.
10 working days
An elevation for every wall, a setting-out plan for the tile, a services drawing, and one number. If your designer has drawn the room, we draw what runs underneath it.
4 to 12 weeks
Nothing is ordered until you sign, and nothing starts until every box is in our unit and checked. This is the whole reason the waiting list exists.
Week 1
Floor up, room back to joists and brick, dust sheets to the front door. You get photographs of what was behind your wall whether you want them or not.
Weeks 2 to 4
Tanking taken 200mm past every splash line, then Sabine tiles and Rowan skims. I walk the room at the end of every day, and things come off the wall on those walks.
The last week
Brassware, joinery, silicone, certificates from Nuala, then a snagging walk with you before the van moves. We come back at six months to look at the grout.
The plumbing is never subcontracted. Nesta does the first fix and the second fix on all twelve bathrooms, every year.
Tiler, with us since 2016
Cuts every mitre on site. Has turned down two of our own rooms because the wall was not flat enough yet, which is why we plaster before she arrives.
Plasterer and builder, since 2015
Structural openings, lintels and every skim. Also the only one of us who enjoys talking to building control.
Electrician, Lic. #000000 (sample)
Underfloor loops, circuits and extract. Tests and certifies every bathroom before we hand the keys back.
Joiner, since 2019
Builds the vanities in his workshop in Lintwell straight from our survey, then fits them himself so nobody can blame anyone else.
Twelve bathrooms a year, and it has been twelve since 2018. That is not scarcity for its own sake, it is what one team finishes properly in fifty weeks with two off in August. A job ahead of you finishes early about three times a year, and when it does we call the list in order.
Most clients use a second bathroom, a gym or a patient neighbour. If this is your only bathroom we will leave a working WC and a basin for all but four days of the job, and we will tell you which four on survey day, not on the morning.
Yes, unless you change your mind or we lift a floor and find something nobody could have known about. That happened on two of twelve bathrooms in 2025, and both times we priced the extra and waited for a yes before touching it.
It is most of what we do. Send the elevations and the schedule and we will send back a services drawing and a short list of the things that will not work, before anybody has ordered anything.
Not if it is all here before we start and there is twelve percent spare for cuts and breakages. If there is not enough, we will tell you at survey rather than start the room and stop in week three.
No. The smallest thing we take on is a whole room. Half a bathroom is where the arguments live, because nobody can agree whose fault the join is.
Nesta every day, Sabine for the tiling weeks, and Rowan, Nuala and Marek for a day or two each. The same five people on every bathroom, and you will have met all of them by name.
Tell us the room and roughly when, and Nesta will reply within two working days with a survey date. Surveys are Thursdays and Fridays, they take ninety minutes, and they cost $450 which comes off your first invoice.