A 1930s Home Redesigned for the Next Stage of Family Life

The family came to us to talk about an extension. What they actually described was a house that no longer matched how they lived: three rooms to do one thing in, a conservatory too cold to use for half the year, and nowhere to work. Before drawing anything we walked the house with them and asked what a normal weekday actually looks like — which is how it became clear that a good deal of the space they needed was already on the plot, in the garage and the conservatory, just not in a usable form.

We measured the house and drew what was actually there — every wall, every level, the drainage and the structure. Surveying the existing plan properly is what showed how much of the ground floor was being lost to circulation and to rooms doing one job each, and it set the constraints the design had to work inside long before anyone talked about knocking anything down.

The family came to us with an existing design from a local architect. It didn't quite work for the way they lived, and its planning permission had lapsed — so rather than start again, we redesigned the space within the proposed floorplan.

The design reclaimed space rather than simply adding it. The garage became a utility, boot room and garden store; the conservatory came down and was rebuilt as a properly insulated sitting room; the kitchen, dining and sitting areas were opened into a single run across the back of the house. A two storey element to the side carried a new bedroom above and gave the front a bay that reads as original. The new home office and music room went into that bay, deliberately, so that working from home had a door on it.

Early in the design process, we established an initial budget of around £170,000. As the design developed and the scope was fully defined, this was refined into a detailed contract value of £182,000 — a figure that remained competitive when the clients obtained comparative quotations from other builders.

The final account was £216,000. Importantly, the movement wasn't the result of the original works simply costing more than expected. Around £15,000 arose from unforeseen ground conditions discovered during construction, while a further £18,000 related to additional works the clients chose to add as the project progressed.

Experiences like this have also shaped the way we work today. Wherever appropriate, we now recommend investigations such as trial holes and drainage surveys during the design stage. They can't eliminate every unknown, but they can identify potential issues earlier, allowing them to be designed, costed and discussed before construction begins.

By developing the design and cost together before construction began, the clients understood what their original project would cost, could test that price against the market, and could make informed decisions when circumstances or their requirements changed during the build.

The elevations were drawn to make the new work look like it had always been there rather than announcing itself. The two storey side element sits under a subservient roofline so it stays lower than the original ridge, the new bay matches the proportions of the existing ones, and the solar array was designed back in rather than lost. This is the package that went to the local authority, and the scheme was built as drawn.

Drawings are hard to live in your head, so the key decisions — the render colour, the roof, the kitchen — were visualised before anything was ordered. Worth comparing these against the photographs further down: the kitchen was built as visualised, down to the sage green shaker doors, the brass cup handles and the open oak shelving. That is the point of doing the thinking first.

The conservatory and garage came down, the new two storey element went up, and the ground floor was opened out under new steelwork with the OPB project team coordinating and sequencing every trade. The pebbledash was replaced with white render, the roof recovered and the solar reinstated, and the front garden became a block paved driveway. The finish is where a build is judged, so the details — the panelled media wall, the jib door, the checkerboard boot room floor — were seen through to the last coat of paint.