Heritage roofing Melbourne

Look at what actually comes off these buildings. The Princess Theatre is slate and metal, with decorative dormers and gilded finials. Melbourne Town Hall is scalloped slate, copper and ironwork. The Royal Exhibition Building is patterned slate with lead. The GPO is a zinc barrel vault. Four buildings, four combinations — and on most of them the failure starts where two materials meet.

That is the trouble with a single-trade contractor on a heritage roof. A slater re-slates and leaves the lead. A roof plumber replaces the flashings and works around slate he would rather not touch. We carry slaters, leadworkers, metal roofers and roof plumbers in the same crews, so the junction between two materials is somebody’s responsibility instead of nobody’s.

The State Library works were delivered on a fully occupied public building — the dome and reading room re-roofed over a library that kept trading. For Victorian heritage work that is the normal condition, not the exception, and it is the part that takes the planning. The roofing is the straightforward half.

In practice it means the program is built around the building’s calendar rather than ours, and that scaffold, exclusion zones and crane picks are agreed with the building manager before a crew turns up. It is why heritage work on a public building runs longer than the roofing alone would suggest — and why a price that ignores all of it is not really a price.

We take terracotta and Marseille tile work on heritage and institutional buildings — original profile matching, mortar analysis and period-appropriate sourcing, with an understanding of how older battening behaves once you load it again.

Being straight about the evidence: our terracotta work is in Sydney. A full re-roof of the Catholic Institute of Sydney at Strathfield, a new terracotta roof on the Bondi Pavilion, and a heritage re-roof of St Francis Xavier’s Church. Same trades, same methods, now available in Victoria under Victorian Building Licence 129688.