Newton Slate & Copper Roofing
Roofers in Newton MA for slate roof repair, copper flashing, historic restoration, gutter work, and ice-dam prevention across all 13 villages.
Newton is thirteen villages, not one town, and the roof a house needs here depends on which village it sits in and what decade it went up. Art Slate Roofing has worked Newton for over twenty years. The owner walks every roof, we measure on site, and the same in-house crew installs what we quote. On a house that was built for slate, we will not talk you into asphalt.
What the village and the era tell us
Newton grew up around its rail stops, its mills on the Charles, and its churches, so each village carries its own building age and its own roofline. Chestnut Hill runs to Tudor Revival and Italianate estates. Newton Highlands is mostly Victorian. Auburndale and Newtonville mix Queen Anne with turn-of-the-century Colonial Revival. The decade a house was built usually decides what belongs back on top of it.
Roofing inside Newton’s Local Historic Districts
Four Newton neighborhoods are Local Historic Districts: Auburndale, Chestnut Hill, Newton Upper Falls, and Newtonville, roughly 887 properties between them. If your house sits inside one, a visible change to the roof goes in front of that district’s Historic District Commission before the first slate comes off. Newton Highlands and West Newton have districts of their own in the works. We have taken roofs through that review before, including a five-color slate Tudor in Newton that the district signed off on, and we build the material samples and drawings the commission wants to see so the meeting does not stall your job. If you are not sure whether your street is inside a district, the City of Newton keeps the boundaries and rules online, or we will check the parcel for you.
See how that plays out on a real roof: our multi-color slate Tudor in Newton, rebuilt to the documented 1920s pattern in reclaimed Vermont slate. For the paperwork side, our note on historic roof permits in Boston walks through what review actually asks for.
- 2005 Family-run since
- 4.9★ 23 Google reviews
- 75–150 yr Slate roof lifespan
- In-house Crew — never subcontracted
Licensed & Insured · MA Construction Supervisor · MHIC Registered
Ice dams on Newton’s shaded streets
The same tree cover that gives Newton its name works against its roofs in winter. Shaded north slopes hold snow long after an open lot has cleared, attic heat melts it from below, and the runoff refreezes at the cold eave until it backs up under the slate. On older Newton homes with original slate and undersized ventilation, that is the leak we get called about every February. Clearing the ice is the symptom. We fix the ventilation and the eave flashing that let the dam form in the first place. More on that in our guide to preventing ice dams in New England.