Providing specialist services for private clients, collectors, estates, and institutions.
Repair, restoration, and conservation across the full spectrum — from routine maintenance to the most complex and sensitive work on instruments of significant value.
Valuations for insurance, probate, and sale, with full professional documentation prepared as required.
Authentication and certification services across a broad range of fine string instruments. Where specialist knowledge is required beyond in-house expertise, Sarah draws on an established network. Condition reports and certificates of authenticity issued as required.
Fine instruments accepted for acquisition and commission sale.
Sarah is based in Somerset and available in London by appointment.
Generational
Luthiers
Trained as a cellist at the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal College of Music, Sarah brought a lifetime of playing to Newark School of Violin Making — and to the bench that has been her focus ever since.
Awarded both the RAB Trust Award and the RAB Special Award at Newark, she went on to receive specialist training from leading experts within the British Violin Making Association. She continues to participate in courses organised by the BVMA, West Dean, and West Dean College of Arts and Conservation, both to deepen her own practice and to contribute to the broader community of makers.
Working from her workshop in Somerset, near Bruton and Castle Cary, Sarah specialises in the repair, restoration, and conservation of fine and antique string instruments, as well as the acquisition and commission sale of historically significant and newly crafted instruments. She is also available in London by appointment.
Padday Luthiers
A family workshop for 40 years
There is a moment in the early eighteenth century to which all subsequent making refers. The workshops of Cremona produced, in that narrow window, instruments of such completeness that the centuries since have functioned less as progress than as apprenticeship — a long attempt to understand what was achieved there, and how.
The inheritance is precise. The forms are known. The wood, the geometry: each element governed by tolerances so fine that the difference between an instrument and a great one is often invisible to any eye but the maker's own. To work within this tradition is to accept that originality is not the aim. The aim is understanding — of the material, of the form, of the particular demands of the instrument taking shape beneath the hands.
The maker who imposes a vision makes furniture. The maker who listens makes something that will outlast them.
An instrument properly made does not stay still. It passes through hands, accumulates history, suffers the slow damage of use and the sudden damage of accident. Wood moves. Varnish thins. The voice that once rang clear grows uncertain, or falls silent altogether. This is not failure. It is the proof of a life fully lived — and it is where the work of restoration begins.
To restore such an instrument is to enter into a conversation already centuries old. The evidence is in the wood itself: in the wear patterns, the old repairs, the places where a previous hand attempted what the current one must now complete. The restorer reads all of this before touching a single thing. Understanding must precede intervention.
To rush is to erase what cannot be recovered.
Sarah came to making through music & her parents' workshop, and to restoration through making. She knows what an instrument is asked to do in the hands of a player, and what it costs to do so. Both inform every decision at the bench: the choice to act, and the harder choice to wait.
Every instrument begins with a conversation. Musicians are welcome to get in touch by email or through the website to discuss their needs, ask questions, or arrange a visit to the workshop.
Instruments may be sent out on approval, giving the player the time and space to live with an instrument before committing to it. Arrangements are made on an individual basis.
There is no obligation to purchase. A refundable deposit holds the instrument whilst a decision is reached, at whatever pace suits the player.
The Paddays work with musicians wherever they are. A conversation costs nothing, and the right instrument, found properly, is worth every step of the journey.
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