What did you find to be the key differences between choosing bricks and stone?
For our latest home we could have chosen brick or stone, as the village is on the boundary of the limestone belt and the clay and the chalk downs, so you get a real variety of materials.
We chose brick for the house because we fell in love with a 19th century brick rectory in a nearby village and took a lot of influence from that for both the design and the materials – including trying to match the brick.

Another factor was the cost and speed: brick even handmade brick is a   lot faster to lay than natural stone and consequently it is
cheaper to build with.

What do you look for when choosing bricks?
Unfortunately finding the right colour took months for this project, and we  must have looked at nearly 100 samples, none of which was
quite right.
Eventually we went back to York Handmade Brick for some advice, and they suggested we consider using a different blend
of their bricks to include more oranges and that we cut some bricks in half to show the darker burnt headers to match the look of old blue
bricks that are found in the traditional local brick.

The result was such a success we still have people knocking on the door to find out which brick we used and several houses and
extensions have used the same brick we basically made up ourselves.