Guides
The questions that decide how a job runs in this housing stock: consent, tenure, services and sequence.
These are written for the buildings we work in — period conversions, purpose-built mansion flats and family houses across Camden, Westminster, Barnet and Haringey. They set out how a process works and what it usually asks of you, rather than offering legal advice on a particular address.
Where a fact depends on the individual property, we say so instead of generalising. The answer for your address is a matter for the survey.
01
Licence to alter: kitchens and bathrooms in leasehold flats
Most flats in North West London are leasehold, and most kitchen and bathroom work in them needs the freeholder's written permission before anything is taken out.
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02
Renovating in a conservation area: what consent actually covers
Much of North West London sits in a conservation area, and the rules bite far harder on the outside of a building than on the rooms inside it.
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03
Renovating a mansion flat: lifts, risers and common parts
A purpose-built mansion block is not a large flat in a converted house. The building itself sets most of the terms.
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04
What decides the cost of a kitchen or bathroom renovation
There is no price list on this site. What follows is what actually moves the figure, so that a proposal reads as a set of decisions rather than a number.
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05
The rear-return kitchen: layouts that work
The standard conversion kitchen in NW6, NW5 and N8 is a narrow rear return, and its width decides almost everything about it.
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06
Tanking and waterproofing bathrooms on timber floors
In a converted house or a mansion flat your bathroom floor is somebody else's ceiling, and timber moves.
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07
Extract and ventilation in period flats
The extract route is one of the few things in a kitchen or bathroom that the building can simply refuse to provide.
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08
Decorating period plaster: lime, patches and lining paper
A wall in a converted Victorian house is usually three or four different materials wearing the same colour.
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09
Original sash windows: decorating them as joinery
A sash window that sticks, rattles or will not stay up has a joinery problem, and no amount of paint is the answer to it.
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10
Living through a renovation: occupied-home sequencing
Most people can stay for a single room. Very few enjoy staying for a whole flat.
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11
The order of works in a light refurbishment
In a whole-flat programme the sequence is the thing you are buying. Everything else is materials and labour.
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12
Hampstead Garden Suburb: internal work under the Trust
The Suburb is one of the few places in London where two separate consent regimes apply to the same house at the same time.
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