Composite front doors in St Ives.

St Ives sits on a bend of the Great Ouse with a medieval bridge chapel, a working Monday market and a housing mix that runs from timber-framed cottages in the old town to late-20th-century estates on the Houghton Road side. Custom Choice serves the town from our Peterborough showroom, about half an hour up the A141, and we treat it as its own market rather than a footnote on the Huntingdon page.

The conservation area around The Broadway, Market Hill and the riverside needs flush-sash or timber-alternative sliding sash if you want the frontage to stay honest. Plenty of those houses are still on tired white uPVC that was the wrong profile the day it went in. Further out, toward Hill Rise and the estates off Harrison Way, the job is usually a whole-house casement replacement or a composite front door that stops looking like the builder’s leftover.

Bifold and French doors are a regular conversation on the houses that back onto the meadow or have a proper garden rather than a yard. St Ives homeowners tend to want the opening to work in both directions — light in winter, the garden in summer — which is why we survey the threshold and the paving before we talk about the colour of the handles.