Charlie Scherer joins as COO at Willmott Dixon Housing, while Mike Hart switches from his current role as director within Willmott Dixon Capital Works to become COO at Willmott Dixon Interiors.

The move sees a return to the company for Charlie, who previously worked as a commercial director before leaving in 2004. He re-joins from Leadbitter where he was their director responsible for the South West and Wales. Prior to that, Charlie was the national housing director at Rok.

In his new role, Charlie will be responsible for developing a strategy for expanding Willmott Dixon’s house building business throughout England and Wales, building on customer relationships and developing innovative ways to meet the ‘more for less’ challenge clients demand.

Willmott Dixon is already one of the country’s largest contractors of residential accommodation, delivering on average 1,500 new homes a year for a mix of local authority, Registered Provider, retirement home and private developer clients including its in-house developer Regen.

The company’s house building activity is mostly in the South East and Midlands, including several long-term estate regenerations, and it's targeting further growth in other parts of the country. It is behind some notable projects such as the UK’s largest Passivhaus residential scheme, in Camden, and Bridport House in Hackney, the tallest multi-storey residential building to feature cross laminated timber as the main structural component. Willmott Dixon’s focus on building energy efficient, low carbon homes will continue, as will its growing workload for its in-house private development brand Regen, for whom it has just started building 181 homes for sale in Greenwich Village.

As COO at Willmott Dixon Interiors, Mike Hart will lead Willmott Dixon’s targeted growth ambitions in the interiors market, where it’s active across several sectors including commercial offices, education, hotel and retail. It already has several repeat business customers such as Tesco and is currently fitting-out 32 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a new eight storey building for the London School of Economics and Political Science. Recently, it fitted out McQ’s new London flagship store in Dover Street.

Both Charlie and Mike will report to Willmott Dixon Capital Works Divisional CEO John Frankiewicz ,who says: “Creating COOs for both our housing and interiors companies reinforces our structure with specialist leadership to complement our focus on work winning, excellence of operational delivery and customer satisfaction. We know that getting these things right will drive our success. We want to emerge from these tough trading conditions as a stronger more efficient business that has successfully ‘stayed ahead of the curve’, been capable of spotting trends and of maximising market opportunities as they present themselves. Our new COOs are a fundamental part of making that happen.”