Natural stone and tiling, Frome
Est. 2006 · Frome, Somerset
Quarrymoor lays natural stone and tile in Frome and the villages around it, and has done since 2006. Most of what we lay is reclaimed and antique stone — flags that spent their first century or two as a chapel floor, a dairy floor, a farmhouse hall — matched and re-laid in houses like yours.
If you live in a period house, you don't want a floor that argues with it. You want stone with some wear already in its face, cut around the skirting rather than through it, laid to follow the room as it actually is.
Most days that means floors — hallways, kitchens, porches. The rest is bathroom and wet room tiling, kitchen splashbacks, sealing and restoring stone that's already down, and underfloor heating run quietly under limestone and travertine.
4.9 across 147 reviews On Google, gathered since 2006
The material
The phrase gets used loosely across Somerset. Here is what it means when we say it — four things worth knowing before anyone quotes you for reclaimed stone flooring.
Reclaimed flagstone is stone that has already been a floor. It gets lifted from chapels, dairies, mills and farmhouses when buildings come down or change, and it arrives with its history on it — tool marks from the first hand that dressed it, and a face polished by a century of feet. We source it, grade it, and match it to your house before a single flag is cut.
A flag that has been walked on for two hundred years dips where the feet went — at the door, by the hearth, along the hall. That hollow is not a defect to grind out; it is the record of the room. We lay reclaimed stone so it keeps its wear, and we level only what the house needs to work, never what it needs to look new.
The record of the room, read by raking light.
Blue lias and the local limestones are full of the sea they were made in. Look closely at a honed flag and you'll find ammonites, shell beds and the odd kerf from a hand-cut edge. It's why no two reclaimed floors match — and why we dry-lay every one before it's fixed. The stones have opinions about where they sit.
Where an antique stone floor needs a new piece — a threshold, a hearth infill, a run scribed to a crooked wall — we cut fresh stone and let it sit quietly beside the worn faces. Saw-fresh edges are eased by hand. Borders follow the skirting the house already has. The new work's whole job is to be forgettable.
The method
Letting a stranger work inside your home for a week is the real decision. This is what that week looks like, in order.
We come and look before we talk money. We lift a corner if we have to, check what the floor is sitting on, and tell you plainly what we find. If the substrate is damp, the screed is green, or the house needs something else doing first, we will say no to a floor that is not ready.
Every floor is laid out loose before anything is fixed. You walk it. We shuffle stones, swap the ones you don't like the look of, and agree the run together. Dry-laid and checked with you — then, and only then, does anything get stuck down.
Days of it, around your life. Dust sheets over what matters, painter's tape on the door frames, the wet saw outside, and the kettle still yours. We work room by room so the house keeps working while we do — and if underfloor heating is going under the stone, this is when it's tested, buried, and tested again.
The last tool out of the van is a broom. Offcuts and dust go with us, not into your skip. The floor is sealed, swept, and left ready to live on — stone sealing and restoration is half our trade, so it's done properly. Then the van doors shut, and the house is yours again.
The work
Real houses, honestly photographed — rooms people are still living in, floors that are honestly not flat. Each one: the house, the stone, and the problem it presented.
The record
They told us our screed wasn't dry enough and came back six weeks later. Nobody else who quoted even mentioned it.
A hallway in reclaimed limestone, Frome
4.9 across 147 reviews The Google record, 2006 to now
We lived in the house the whole time. Tea got made, doors got taped, and every evening the floor was swept and the tools were gone.
A kitchen floor, laid over five days
You cannot tell where the old flags end and the new cuts begin. That was the whole point, and they understood it before we'd said it.
Antique flags repaired and re-laid, near Beckington
The dry lay sounds like a formality until you're standing on it, moving stones around your own hallway. Nothing went down until we'd looked.
A terrace hallway, Victorian, Frome
Start with a look
No forms about budgets, no hard sell. Say where the house is and what the floor is doing, and we'll arrange a time to come and see it as it actually is.
Nothing is fixed until you've seen it laid out