Stone,
built to last
Heritage restoration, fireplaces, feature and retaining walls, fences and sandstone paving — every course laid by hand.
Sound stonework outlives the mason. Poor stonework outlives its welcome.
The work
Heritage restoration
Conservation · Repointing
Tasmania holds some of the oldest stone buildings in the country, and a great deal of well-meant repair has quietly damaged them — usually through mortar. Hard modern cement traps moisture inside soft sandstone, so the stone decays instead of the joint. We work the other way round: the mortar is the sacrificial element, softer than the stone, so it weathers and can be renewed while the stone stays sound.
- Repointing in lime-based and matched mortars
- Rebuilding failed or bulging wall sections
- Stone replacement matched for type and tooling
- Chimney and parapet rebuilds
- New construction into historic fabric
- Work alongside heritage consultants
Fireplaces & interiors
Chimney breasts · Hearths
Interior stonework is judged from a metre away, in daylight, for years. Joints must hold consistent, stone selection has to be balanced across the whole face, and the coursing has to resolve cleanly at the firebox and the ceiling. We build to your firebox specification and coordinate with your builder from frame stage.
- Full-height chimney breasts to raked ceilings
- Freestanding, inbuilt and double-sided units
- Stone hearths, mantels and lintels
- Interior feature walls
Retaining walls & fences
Structural · Engineered
A retaining wall is a structure holding back a mass of wet soil, and what decides its survival is invisible once it's finished — the footing, the drainage, the free-draining backfill, and whether the design accounts for the load above. On Hobart's steep terrain, with landslip overlays across many hillside properties, this is where the money should go.
- Structural stone retaining, engineered where required
- Tiered and stepped retaining on sloped sites
- Boundary walls, entry pillars, letterboxes
- Stone-and-timber fencing and screens
Feature walls
Freestanding · Cladding
A feature wall's whole job is to be looked at, which makes the stone selection, the coursing and the meeting of materials the entire brief. Some of our best work sets stone against something deliberately unlike it — raking coursework into weathered corten, a curved wall against a flat roofline, warm sandstone over hardwood decking.
- Freestanding and cladding feature walls
- Raked, curved and stepped walls
- Stone facing to new construction
- Stone with steel, timber and concrete
Paving & landscape
Flagging · Steps
Sandstone paving is one of the few surfaces that looks better after ten years than the day it went down — provided it's laid on the right base with the right falls. We handle the awkward parts: cutting around trees and services, matching into existing paving, level thresholds at doorways.
- Sandstone and natural stone flagging
- Solid stone steps and treads
- Courtyards, paths and entries
- Edging, kerbing and thresholds
Recent work
Stone that outlasts us
Hensby Masonry is a local, family owned and operated business working in natural stone across Tasmania — sandstone, dolerite, granite and local fieldstone — from the conservation of 19th-century buildings to contemporary fireplaces and structural retaining walls. We work with all stone, both Australian natural stone and imported international stone, and we work directly for homeowners and alongside builders, architects, landscape designers and heritage consultants.
There is no shortcut in this trade and no way to fake it. The wall is the reference.
Tell us about the job
The more you can tell us upfront, the more useful our first answer will be. Photographs of the site help enormously — even phone photos — and so does a rough idea of the height, length or area involved.