Welcome to the NEW Website!

Hello and welcome to the new (and improved) website for Oakes Restoration.

After many years with the old website, it was time for something new - although, as someone who spends much of his working life looking after old things, I probably shouldn't complain too much about its age!

The new website has been put together with a great deal of help from David-John Cousins, or "Little David" as I tend to call him.

I've known David and his family for many years. His father, Melvyn Cousins of A.G. Cousins & Son, gave me some of my earliest opportunities to display and restore antiques through his furniture store in Hertford. Years later, David started helping me with client visits and drop-offs, photography and, increasingly, the technological side of the business. During his student days, he helped me get started with social media and put together the original Oakes Restoration website.

That website served us well, but had become something of an antique itself. David has now helped me bring things up to date and create a website that better reflects the quality and breadth of the work carried out at Oakes Restoration today.

What you see now is only the starting point. There may be the odd glitch while we continue refining things, but we felt it was better to get the new site up and running and build upon it properly.

Over the coming months, you can expect to see:

• A greatly expanded Workshop section, with case studies covering both old and new projects

• An expanded Services section, with more information and examples of the work I undertake

• Higher-resolution photographs and videos throughout the site

On that last point, David is also hoping to arrange a new photoshoot with me in the near future. Apparently some of the photographs of me working on the old website are now closer to his age than mine!

Most importantly, I hope the new website gives me somewhere to share more of the work that comes through the workshop. Over the years I have photographed hundreds of jobs, from relatively straightforward repairs to unusual and challenging restoration projects, but very little of that work has ever made it online. That is something we hope to change.

Thank you for visiting the new website and for your continued support of Oakes Restoration. Please do check back from time to time - there is plenty more to come.

David Oakes

Oakes Restoration