DH Painter & Decorator paints house exteriors in White Hills (NN2), the residential district on Northampton's northern limits, about 2.8 miles north of the town centre. Dean covers the 1930s estate opposite Kingsthorpe Cemetery, the larger detached homes on Harborough Road North and the houses facing open countryside.
Three kinds of outside job on one northern edge
White Hills sits between the A508 Harborough Road North and the A5199 Welford Road, north of old Kingsthorpe. It started in the 1930s, when an estate went up along Harborough Road opposite Kingsthorpe Cemetery, and White Hills Crescent and White Hills Way are among the streets mapped on that original estate. Mixed in with it are individually built detached houses on big plots off Harborough Road North (a sale listing gave one as roughly 2,226 sq ft on 0.4 acre), and the McCarthy Stone retirement flats at Wardington Court on Welford Road.
Each of those is a different exterior. An inter-war estate house usually means bays, a front door, sills and a run of fascia, some of it original timber and some swapped for uPVC over the years. A detached house on a large plot means long elevations, several sets of windows and a quote that runs over more days. The retirement flats are leasehold, so outside decoration there is arranged through the managing agent rather than a single owner.
Traffic film on Harborough Road North
Harborough Road North is mapped as a trunk road, and houses fronting it pick up a grey film from passing traffic and spray thrown up in wet weather. Paint over that film does not bond well, and it also makes a fresh coat look dull within a season or two. On these frontages the first day is often a thorough wash-down of walls, frames and sills, with time left for everything to dry before any filling or priming starts.
Working on a busy road frontage also changes how the job is set up. Ladders and the van have to be placed with care for traffic, and on a shared private drive such as Anchor Drive we let the neighbours know about parking and access before the first morning. Garage courts on the estate edges can sometimes take the van when the road is tight.
The outermost houses face the wind
North of White Hills there is Buckton Fields and then open countryside towards Boughton. Houses on that outer edge take more wind and driven rain than houses tucked deeper into the estate, and you can see it in the timber: south-facing sills fade, and north and west faces open up at joints and end grain sooner. For those houses Dean puts more time into filling and priming exposed joinery and favours finishes made for harder exposure. Our guide to when to paint outside in the UK explains why the calendar matters more on an exposed site.
How a White Hills exterior usually runs
| Stage | What it involves here |
|---|---|
| Walk round | Check timber for soft spots, look at any rendered upper storey, note uPVC that only needs cleaning |
| Wash and treat | Road film off front elevations, fungicidal wash where gardens shade the walls |
| Protect | Tie back mature shrubs, sheet paths and drives, agree parking on shared drives |
| Prepare | Scrape, fill and spot-prime bays, sills and doors on the 1930s houses |
| Paint | Masonry first, then timber and metal, working with the sun around the house |
Colour without a heritage permit
None of White Hills sits in a conservation area, and the sources we checked show no Article 4 direction here. The controlled areas are the old Kingsthorpe village core further south. So a White Hills owner can change a front door colour, go from white to a darker joinery shade, or paint a rendered gable without heritage consent. Many inter-war houses still look right in period-friendly colours, but that is your choice to make, not a rule.
Dean travels up to White Hills from our Northampton base. For the full list of surfaces we take on outside, see our main exterior painting service, and for everything else we do in the district, the White Hills area page.
Last updated by Dean, DH Painter & Decorator.
