Have you got a house that's big in the wrong places?

This large 4 bed house has a generous hall, good size living room facing south that’s open to the dining area, a separate kitchen – when the clients want a more open family / entertaining arrangement. There’s a big utility room and an integral garage useful for bikes and general stuff.

But in a family of 5 you want another space so people can play games or listen to music without disturbing others. There is a conservatory, and while they’re good for their original purpose of growing plants, they’re too hot in summer and too cold in winter to really use as living space. Also this one’s gone rotten.

And they want somewhere that can work as an occasional guest room too. And a general concern is that the front gets all the sun from the south, but the back of the house a lot less so.

So there are two main variables – does the new extra space go at the front or the back, and whether or not to extend. So that’s four options. Firstly, not extending.

We keep the front of the garage as a bike store, utility and boot room, so you can leave your muddy boots there before coming in through a new door into the hall… where there’s a new wall of storage for coats and things.

We open up double doors into the kitchen to bring through as much light as possible from the south, then the old utility room and a bit of the garage becomes a new living space with a sofabed.

Now the old conservatory’s been removed there’s more evening light to the back of the house from the west, and the glazing wraps around the corner to take advantage of that. And there’s an ensuite connecting to the existing waste.

So that’s all the spaces they need within the footprint of the existing house.

The other way of doing this would be to have the new living space at the sunny front of the house in the existing garage, with the utility / bike room at the back.

If we extend out the back, the opposite side to the existing conservatory to let in more evening light, we can make space for a new family living space that opens up to the garden. We’ve shown this angled to keep a clear view of the garden from the kitchen window. And note that all that west-facing glazing you’ll need external shading like external blinds to prevent that space overheating.

Then there’s space for a separate guest room at the front.

For a wider extension you’d need a lot more structural work to get an open feeling between the kitchen and the new living space, but there’d be more space for an extra bedroom and more storage.

So which would you go for? Let me know in the comments!

The actual clients went with a combination of elements – the more compact extension, with the bike store – boot room at the front, and a separate utility / pantry in between.

And if you’d like us to unlock the layout of your property – get in touch through the link in the bio!

Office to Residential conversion - how many flats can you get?

We’ve been asked by another architect to have a look at this them because we’re floorplanning experts.

It’s an office block in London that a developer wants to convert into residential use. There’s 240sqm gross internal area on a typical floor. Windows facing the street to the east, a line of columns, the main stairs and lift, and a second means of escape from the back.

Let’s look at mostly standard 1 beds first. These need to meet nationally described space standard of 50sqm.

On one here. The noise of the lift would be annoying to lets shield the bedroom from this by placing the bathroom here. Storage space next to it. Bedroom, maybe a run of kitchen at the back of the living room, then the dining area zones this off from the living room.

This remaining bit of space only has one window and this becomes a 37.5sqm studio flat. Bathroom and storage at the back, kitchen dining living space, the bedroom area in an alcove. Maybe you could curtain that off.

Come back for Part 2 and I’ll show you the rest!

So we’re converting this office to residential and in part 1 did the first two flats.

This next 1 bed is quite deep. If we have an opening with a sliding door you’d open up views to the other window. This could be a study / dressing zone for the bedroom. Bathroom and storage to the rear. Kitchen the other side. Dining and living at the front.

Then this one bed can have its bedroom to the back. Maybe I should have put the door the other side. Bathroom and storage in the centre. Kitchen in the centre too then a nice living area at the front.

So that’s 3 50sqm 1 beds, plus 1 37.5sqm studio, so 187.5sqm or in developer speak 2018sqft per typical floor. That’s just shy of 80% net to gross, which isn’t too shabby for a conversion where things like windows and stair locations are set.

We offer this Layout Service as a separate service, so if you’d like us to unlock the layout of your property, get in touch through the link in the bio!

Top 5 design mistakes #5: Kitchen Creep

Open plan living space is fine for lots of people, but if it’s not properly zoned – it can just turn out squalid.

Big gloomy kitchen units looming down on you, with no separation between the kitchen and the sitting area you feel like you’ll get frying oil spattering on your upholstery.

Even just visually, when there’s a big sprawl of kitchen units, they dominate an open plan space.

It’s not giving ‘hosting a dinner party’, it’s giving ‘depressing bedsit’.

What you need instead are proper zones. Here they’ve got the kitchen at one end, they’ve used an island to create a threshold, zoning off the kitchen units and protecting the seating area at the other end.

In an open plan space a kitchen island can be a great way to create this separation. You can still talk over it, but you don’t feel like you’re sitting among the pots and pans.

In a smaller space, a kitchen peninsular works well too.

And rather than too many units everywhere you can also use furniture for storage, that doesn’t look kitcheny, and can happily go in the rest of the space.

We unlock the layout of this Victorian terraced house

How would we unlock the layout of this three storey terraced house, that’s only got one bedroom?

It’s recently sold, Grade II listed, in Islington, from the early 1850s, built without the large rear projections of later Victorian houses, so there’s just two rooms per floor.

On the lower ground floor they’ve knocked through an open plan kitchen diner. On the raised ground floor the rooms aren’t massive so knocking a doorway through makes sense.

Then on the top floor the back room’s a bathroom with a bedroom at the front. But there’s no more floors so that’s all the bedrooms – just one in a family house!

Islington wouldn’t let you add a mansard, so what can we do?

Sometimes it’s possible to pop a little bathroom under the roof slope above the half landing of the stairs but it doesn’t look like there’s space here.

But Islington’s policy does generally allow for some extensions at the rear, and a couple of neighbours have two-storey extensions too.

<so in Part 2 we’ll have a look at what we could do!>

So with a two-storey extension you could move the bathroom down half a floor to free up the back room as a second bedroom.

Then under the bathroom you could have a lovely working from home space opening up to the garden.

If you wanted a third bedroom you could move the a make a more formal dining area upstairs and have a kitchen diner and a bedroom below.

And, maybe extend the rear of the lower ground floor. Because it’s below the ground level, this would get caught up in Islington’s basement policy. They introduced this in response to troglodyte billionaires digging subterranean caverns, which caused all sorts of problems nearby.

So you’d need to spend £40k just on reports about water tables and suchlike, but it could be an opportunity to get a lovely dining space opening up to the garden.

So if you’d like us to unlock the layout of your property, get in touch!

How can we make the most of a house's view?

How can you unlock the layout of your home, to maximise views, and practicality?

For this project the client has a bungalow, the original part here, with an existing extension containing a bedroom, bath and utility room to the side, what’s currently a garage to the other side, and a further extension he has planning for here, containing a study / 3rd bedroom. It’s in a lovely spot in the channel islands, with a view down to the town and the sea to the south here.

The existing proposals show many of the internal walls removed, which are structural and would need to be replaced with steels above the ceiling. This makes an L-shaped open plan kitchen living dining space, with the garage converted into a walk in wardrobe and main bedroom ensuite.

The client isn’t an American, so didn’t feel he needed a walk in wardrobe, normal wardrobes in the bedroom would be fine, and he’s prefer to keep the garage as a kind of hobby / workshop space than convert it. His other concern was that he’d prefer to have acoustic separation possible between the kitchen so different people can do different things.

My feeling was that there was a lot of structural work in removing the walls, but so much opening up was making a very wide space for a normal ceiling height, which can start to feel compressed.

So one option we proposed was to flip over the kitchen and main bedroom, so the main bedroom can use the utility room space for it’s en suite, and the utility room stuff can go in the workshop hobby space. The kitchen and dining are arranged along an axis, with double doors allowing separation. The kitchen looks over the front in a neighbourly way, to the front garden which gets the afternoon sun. And a column or two help define the dining area as a separate zone, which reduces the need for steels above.

Then this alternative arranges all the main rooms around the primary view to the sea. A big square sitting room, the kitchen screened by a large sliding door, then the dining area in a cosy, focused space at the end of the enfilade of interlinked spaces.

We’re keeping more of the structure in the front of the house, the existing bathroom becomes an ‘off-suite’ to the main bedroom, and keeping the utility room means the hobby room could count as a fourth bedroom.

So we could spend that structure money on a line of columns, full width glazing behind, to maximise the expansive views from the inside of the house down to the sea. You’d need some solar shading to this to prevent overheating, so why not plant vines? Lovely!

So if you’d like us to unlock the layout of your property, get in touch through the link in the bio!

Do need an architect? Or somebody else?

There’s Architects like me, technicians, draughtspeople. So who’s right for your project?

Basically it comes down to design, and complexity.

Architects train for at least 7 years, with  experience on a range of buildings like housing, private homes, public buildings, from the urban scale down to the detail.

So if you want that design thinking  – for a bespoke house extension, or to see the development capacity of a site – get an architect.

Architect is a protected title – you need to be registered with the ARB, optionally the RIBA too. And we’re heavily regulated. We use the RIBA Plan of work, a detailed tool to manage the risk in project. But that takes time, which we have to charge for. If the projects too small, it’s just gets proportionally more expensive for us to provide the full set of services from concept design through to completion.  

Architectural Technicans – look out for ones who are chartered with CIAT – often specailise in the simpler residential projects, albeit generally with more of a technical emphasis and less of a design focus.

There’s also unqualified draughts people offering ‘architectural services’. The might be fine for preparing drawings with no design work but beware. I’ve seen them design planning refusals for obvious reasons, or designs for spaces you physically can’t get into!

But if you want the architect’s design thinking, without committing to the full suite of services, we offer a layout service, so our clients get our design thinking to unlock the potential of your property, even if they end up working up those ideas with a technician or their builder.

What can you do to a Listed Building?

Just because a building is listed, doesn’t mean you can’t make changes. But you do need consent, and you need to show that the changes need to improve the heritage value of the building.

For example by restoring historic layouts. This grade II listed house had had a first floor reception room chopped up into bedrooms. We got permission to reinstate the space to its former grandeur.

We got Listed Building Consent to restore the first floor drawing room to its original grandeur.

Or restoring features, like this arcade feature, which we opened back up.

We obtained permission to reopen the blocked up archway between the front and middle rooms of this Georgian house.

Improving the aesthetic value too, here of a 1970s extension which marooned this middle room from any windows. We opened up a new arch from the dining room, and continued the arch theme in new windows opening up the view to the sea.

But what you build, has to match what you’ve got permission for, because it’s a criminal matter not to. What can seem like pragmatic decisions can be costly mistakes to put right.  So I’d strongly recommend keeping your architect on board during the build so changes are managed properly.