Worthington Valley, Maryland · 2024
Custom houses · Estate restoration · Since 1996
We honour architecture,
We honour architecture,
history, and craft.
Revival Building Co. builds a small number of houses each year in Maryland and the mid-Atlantic — new work and old, in stone, timber and lime, by people who cut the joints themselves.
Our position
A house should be worth repairing in a hundred years. Everything we do follows from that one sentence.
We are a building company, not a developer and not a design studio with a crew attached. We take on four or five houses a year because that is how many one team can build to this standard — and because the work is done by the same hands from the first stone to the last coat of wax.
- Building since
- 1996
- Houses completed
- 60and counting
- Projects at a time
- 4maximum
- Structural warranty
- 10years
Selected work
Five houses, and what each of them asked for.
We publish the whole story of a project or none of it — the survey, the things that went wrong, the details we would do differently. There is not much use in a portfolio that only shows the finished corner.
Craftsmanship
Four trades we keep in the building.
Most builders of this size subcontract everything. We keep timber framing, masonry, joinery and plaster in house, because these are the four that decide whether a house is any good.
Timber
A joint cut by hand, in green oak
Mortise, tenon, draw-bored peg. We cut our frames green in our own shop and dry-fit every bent on the floor before it goes near a site. As the oak dries the joints tighten. That is not romance; it is the reason five-hundred-year-old barns are still standing.
Stone
Random-coursed rubble, raked joints
Every face stone is cut on site by the mason who will lay it, which is the only way to get a wall where no joint runs and no course repeats. We point in hot-mixed lime. Cement is stronger than the stone it sits against, and that is exactly the problem with it.
Joinery
Panelling, run in the shop
Raised panels, bolection mouldings, dentil cornice — all run on our own spindle from timber we have air-dried for four years. Machines get the stock close. A hand plane gets the surface, and a hand-planed surface takes light differently. You can see it from across a room.
Plaster
Three-coat lime on riven lath
Lime plaster moves with the building, buffers moisture, and can be repaired in a hundred years by anyone who cares to learn. It takes six weeks to carbonate and cannot be hurried. We plan the programme around it rather than the other way round.
How a project runs
Four stages, and none of them are rushed.
01
Conversation
Long before drawings. We want to know the site, the house you grew up in, and what you are actually trying to fix. Most of our projects begin two years before the first invoice.
02
Drawings and survey
We measure everything, whether the house exists yet or not. On restorations that means a hand survey of what is really there — which is never what the old drawings say.
03
The shop
Frames, joinery and panelling are cut and dry-fitted at Mill Race Road before anything reaches the site. It is slower on paper and considerably faster in practice.
04
On site, and afterwards
One project manager, one crew, one house at a time. We come back at the first winter, the first summer, and the second year — because that is when a building tells you what it thinks.
Enquiries
Every house begins with a long conversation.
We take on a small number of projects each year, and we would rather talk early — before the drawings harden — than late. Tell us where you are and what you are hoping to make.