Kitchens Cropwell Bishop
Cropwell Bishop and Cropwell Butler are two different villages about a mile apart, and people mix them up constantly. This is the larger of the two, in the Vale of Belvoir, with the creamery at the edge of it.
The housing is period brick cottages and farmhouses around the old core, with postwar and modern development around them. We design and fit kitchens across both villages and the Vale from our showroom on Derby Road in Stapleford, fourteen miles west.
Farmhouse and cottage kitchens
These are the most enjoyable kitchens to design and the least predictable to plan.
Thick walls, ceilings that change height from room to room, floors that have moved, and rooms that are rarely square. Beams and structural timbers in some of them, which cannot be moved and have to be worked around rather than boxed in and forgotten.
Traditional Kitchens Cropwell Bishop
Traditional Kitchens
Cropwell Bishop Nottingham
Everything gets scribed to the wall rather than pushed against it. A standard wall-unit run at standard height can foul a lower ceiling — a survey question rather than a showroom one, and far cheaper resolved before anything is ordered.
Where a ceiling is low, taking wall units right up to it gives a full extra shelf and removes the dust gap on top. In a smaller kitchen that storage is worth more than a cornice.
The period brick cottages and farmhouses in the core of Cropwell Bishop share a set of problems: thick walls, deep window reveals, uneven floors and rooms that were never square to begin with.
A traditional framed kitchen is the honest answer in a building like that. It gives us a frame to scribe to at every junction, and it allows a run to stop at a dresser or a chimney breast rather than pretending the wall is straight enough to continue.
Most of these houses still have one in the kitchen, and it is usually the best thing in the room. A range or a cooker set into the old opening, with a mantel above it, gives you a focal point that no amount of cabinetry will match.
The alcoves either side take full-height storage neatly, and they are almost always different widths, which is precisely why a made-to-fit approach beats a modular one here.
Deep reveals mean less light gets in than the window size suggests. Colbeck Marine Light Grey and Chiltern Slate Mist keep a room readable, where a heavy colour on every face can close it down.
We usually mix — a darker island or base run, lighter above.
Modern Kitchens Cropwell Bishop
Services
In older village property the real constraint is usually where the services already run rather than what you want to do with the space. Waste runs are fixed, gas is frequently surface-mounted, and moving a sink any distance means achieving a fall to the existing waste — which on a solid floor is a bigger job than it appears.
Entirely doable, but it needs to be in the plan and the price from the start rather than discovered in week two.
Where a property is listed, internal alterations can need consent as well as external ones, through Rushcliffe Borough Council.
Around the older core there is postwar and modern housing with none of those constraints. Square rooms, level floors, standard ceiling heights.
That makes a contemporary handleless scheme straightforward, and it makes the budget go further, because almost nothing has to be made to fit an irregularity.
Deep drawers beat base cupboards for anything heavy, because you bring the contents to you rather than kneeling to reach the back. Corner carousels solve a problem that a well-planned layout can often avoid entirely.
We would rather design the dead corner out than sell you a mechanism to reach into it.
We fit Neff. The slide-and-hide door is genuinely useful in a smaller room where a dropped oven door blocks the walkway, which is the case in most village kitchens of this size.
In Frame Kitchens Cropwell Bishop
The newer housing
Regular rooms, straight walls, level floors. Often already open to a dining area, or an easy route to one. An island is realistic where there is a metre of clear floor all round it, more like 1.2 metres on the working side if two people cook at the same time.
Doors and colour
Painted shaker suits the village housing, and the older rooms with small original windows take deeper colour better than pale finishes, which go flat in that light. Colbeck Heritage Green and Georgian Thicket both hold up.
Warwick is the in-frame range, with the door set inside the cabinet frame — the more traditional construction and the right look in a farmhouse or cottage.
For the brighter modern rooms, Denton Porcelain Cashmere and Clarkwell Light Grey Graphite, with Zagen and Cameo at the handleless end. We fit Neff appliances including the venting hobs.
About thirty minutes into Stapleford. It is a drive, and it is the reason we keep everything on display rather than in a sample folder.
0115 877 7595, worth a call from this distance to confirm a specific range is out.
Every project is surveyed properly before ordering. In the older cottages that survey usually changes something on the drawing, which is exactly what it is for.
Cropwell Bishop is Rushcliffe. Some of the older farm property is listed, where internal alterations can need consent as well as external ones. Worth confirming a specific address early.
Kitchens Gallery
Half an hour out
Derby Road, Stapleford, NG9 7AD. Parking on site.
Call 0115 877 7595 or come and look — painted doors are worth seeing under real light.
