A finished oak framed porch over a front door: two posts carrying a beam with curved braces, a single-pitch roof running back to the house wall, tiled in clay tiles with lead flashing along the abutment.

Horsham · 2022

Oak framed porch, Horsham

A single-pitch oak framed porch, designed and built by us: air dried oak frame, softwood rafters, and a painted ply soffit so the underside reads as a board rather than a membrane.

Town: Horsham

An oak framed porch in Horsham, West Sussex, designed and built by Tennant Carpentry & Building. The frame is air dried oak cut on traditional joints; the rafters are softwood; the roof is clay tiles.

The part you only see from underneath

Most porch roofs are boarded, felted and tiled, and the felt is what you look at from the doorstep. Here painted ply is fixed over the rafters instead, so the underside reads as rafters and a painted board.

It costs more and nobody asks for it in a brief. It is the difference between a porch that looks right from the pavement and one that also looks right from under it.

A single pitch

A lean-to roof has no truss to hide anything in, so the work is all in the junctions: the brace into the post, the rafter foot onto the beam, and the line where the tiles meet the wall. That last one is lead, stepped into the brick courses rather than sealed against them.

How it went in

01

The frame, raised

Two posts, a beam across their heads and a curved brace let into each junction, standing off the face of the house. It is a single pitch rather than a gable, so the beam carries the low end and the wall carries the high one — which puts all the geometry into how the roof meets the brickwork rather than into a truss.

An oak porch frame standing against a brick house: two posts carrying a beam with a curved brace let into each junction, with a ladder, a spirit level and tools on the ground around it.

02

Rafters and the roof board

Softwood rafters run from the beam back up to the wall, and painted ply is fixed over the top of them. That is the decision worth pointing at: the ply is not structural and it is not a saving. It is there so that anyone standing at the door and looking up sees a painted board between the rafters instead of the underside of a roofing membrane.

The oak porch frame with its softwood rafters fixed and a continuous board laid over them, seen from the pavement with the front door beneath and the porch reading as a finished shape before tiling.

03

The soffit, from underneath

From below, with the rafters exposed and the painted ply between them. The rafter feet sit on the oak beam and the boards run tight to each side of them, so the line you read from the doorstep is timber and paint rather than felt. It is the part of the job nobody photographs and everybody standing at the door looks at.

Looking up at the underside of the porch roof: softwood rafters running from the oak beam back to the house wall, with painted white ply boarding fixed between and above them, and the oak beam and brace in the foreground.

04

Finished

Clay tiles to match the house, with lead flashing stepped into the brickwork along the abutment and a black gutter carried across the low edge. The oak is left bare — pale here, and it will silver on the faces that take the weather.

The completed oak framed porch seen from the front: posts and braces in pale oak, the single-pitch roof tiled in clay tiles with stepped lead flashing where it meets the house, and a black gutter along the front edge.

This project involved oak frame work. See more work across West Sussex.

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