HAWKESBURY HORSE ARENA SPECIALISTS
From rough paddock to ready-to-surface arena. Survey, drainage, base, levelling, compaction — all in one crew, one machine, one fixed-price quote. Owner Jesse Madden runs every job personally.
Owner-operated. Fixed-price quotes. $20M insured.
WHY HORSE PEOPLE CALL JESSE
A good riding surface is the last 100mm. Everything underneath it — the cut, the drainage, the base material, the compaction — decides whether the arena rides true in five years or turns into a soup hole every wet season. We get the underneath right.
Aggregate base, agg lines, geofabric. Water moves where you want it, not where the slope wants it.
Clay through Pitt Town. Sandstone shelf through Kurrajong. Flood plain through Cattai. Different country, different build.
Not a project manager checking in once a week. Owner-operator, on the machine, all day.
EVERY DISCIPLINE
20m × 60m standard, 20m × 40m short. Precise grading, even base, true level all the way down. Surface-ready for sand-and-fibre or rubber-and-sand.
Large-format pads, edge drainage trenches, robust base for the impact loads of jumps. Often built alongside warm-up arenas.
Training rounds, breaking yards, lunging rings. 14m to 22m diameter. Crowned base for shed water, edge ag-line for runoff.
Multi-discipline pads sized for whatever your property needs — agility for the kids' ponies on one side, full dressage on the other.
Course clearing, jump take-off and landing pads, drainage on cross-country tracks. Acreage-scale work.
Tear out the bad base, fix the drainage someone skipped, lay new aggregate, recompact. We rescue arenas that should have been built right the first time.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
The Hawkesbury is one of the best horse-property regions in Australia, but it's three different countries when you start digging. A flood-plain arena in Cattai needs a fundamentally different drainage strategy than a slope arena in Kurrajong Heights. Most arena failures we get called to rebuild are jobs the original builder treated as one-size-fits-all.
Reactive clay holds water and moves with moisture. Geofabric goes in before any aggregate to stop the clay pumping into your base. Skip that step and the arena turns to porridge in a wet winter.
Shallow sandstone shelf means cut depth is always an unknown until the bucket goes in. We bring rippers and breakers as standard, not "if needed" — and that's why our quotes don't blow out mid-job.
The whole strategy changes. Pad is elevated, drainage runs to the lowest point on the property, and surface choice has to forgive sitting underwater for short periods. We've built and rebuilt arenas through 2021 and 2022 floods.
Council note: Most rural-zoned arenas under a certain footprint don't need DA approval, but the rules vary across Hawkesbury, Penrith, and Blue Mountains LGAs. We've worked through the council process enough times to flag it during your free site visit — no surprises mid-build.
FIXED-PRICE QUOTE
The number on your quote is the number on the invoice. No surprise extras. No "we hit something we didn't expect" — because we did the site survey before quoting.
HOW IT WORKS
Tell us what you're building. Dressage? Show jumping? Round yard? We talk it through and book a site visit.
Jesse comes out, takes levels, walks the slope and the drainage. You get a fixed-price written quote within 48 hours.
30/70 deposit terms, build dates locked into the calendar. Most arenas finish in 3-7 days depending on size and access.
Pad surveyed, signed off, and ready for your surface installer to drop in sand, fibre, or rubber.
SERVICE AREA
We're based at East Kurrajong and work right across horse country in the Hawkesbury, Blue Mountains, and the rural pockets of Penrith. If your property is on acreage in Western Sydney, we'll get there.
QUESTIONS WE GET A LOT
A standard 20m × 60m dressage arena pad-only build (everything under the surface) typically runs from $18,000 to $35,000 depending on access, soil type, slope, and drainage requirements. Round yards from $4,500. Show-jumping arenas with edge drainage and warm-up areas from $30,000+. Quotes are fixed-price after a free site visit — no surprise extras.
Round yards 1-2 days. Standard dressage arena 3-5 days. Larger show-jumping arenas with full edge drainage 5-7 days. Wet weather can extend timelines — we'd rather wait a day for the right ground than rush a wet base.
In most cases on rural-zoned land in the Hawkesbury, Penrith, and Blue Mountains LGAs, an arena is exempt or complying development if it's under certain size/height limits and not in a flood-prone overlay. We'll flag the council situation during the free site visit — but the call is yours to confirm with council before we start.
We deliver a compacted, level, drained sub-base. Your surface installer (or you, if you're laying it yourself) brings the riding surface — typically washed sand, sand-and-fibre, or rubber-and-sand. We don't supply the surface itself but we'll happily recommend installers we've worked with locally.
Yes — we get a lot of these jobs. Usually it's drainage that wasn't built right. We'll come out, diagnose what's gone wrong, and quote either a targeted fix (re-grading, edge drainage retrofit) or a full rebuild. The good news: rebuilds are cheaper than first-time builds because the cut work is mostly done.
Free site visit. Fixed-price quote within 48 hours. Owner on every job.