MALMESBURY building contractors AC Nurden Ltd have won a prestigious award for their work renovating Cotswold Park Barns.

They won the Building Excellence Award for the West of England in the Best Change of Use of an Existing Building or Conversion category out of 1,800 buildings.

They were nominated for the award by Cotswold District Council who monitored the building work from day one.

During the middle of the 1900’s The Cotswold Park Estate became a working dairy and all of the farm buildings were used for this purpose.

In the late 70’s the last cow was milked and the dairy stopped. The barns were then not used as the main house was rented out to non-farming tenants and the land was used purely for sheep grazing.

The barns are listed buildings and at the turn of the century there were murmurs that they needed work done to them and fairly soon.

The work started on the renovation in 2012 and took 14 months to complete, with a difficult spring and summer of rain hindering progress in 2013.

The finished product has been impressing visitors to Cotswold Park Barns ever since.

“We were very pleased to have won,” said Andrew Nurden, managing director of AC Nurden. “It’s a very prestigious award.

“We won out of a total of 9,000 builders in the region and now go onto the national finals in November.”

Cotswold Park Barns owner, Simon Hanbury was thrilled with the work AC Nurden had done.

He said: “AC Nurden couldn’t have been more deserving of the award.

“The thing that made the difference was that I had a group of builders that worked as a team throughout. They became a part of the entire project and in all honesty it was sad when they left.

“They worked their backsides off through terrible weather and the finish was absolutely phenomenal.

“When there was a problem, they would sort it straight away, I couldn’t have asked for more.

“Andy asked me at the awards if there was anything I would change with the finished product and I really struggled to think of a single thing.”