We’ve been working out of our studio on Shepherds Bush Road since 2013, and if we’re honest, most of what we know didn’t come from a textbook. It came from old houses. Georgian townhouses, Victorian terraces, Edwardian mansion flats, the odd mews house tucked away behind a main road.
Some are listed. Lots sit in conservation areas.
And almost every one of them has been “improved” at some point by an owner who meant well.
People ask us what the hardest bit of a period renovation is. Not the design, usually. It’s deciding which parts of the old house are worth fighting for, and which you can let go of without losing anything that matters.
The fourth bedroom was already there
Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. A three-bedroom Edwardian apartment, and clients who needed four. You can’t extend an apartment, so there was nowhere to go but inwards.
Edwardian flats weren’t planned for the way people live now: long corridors, rooms sized for entertaining guests rather than for homework and laundry. Once we started reworking the plan, the fourth bedroom was there, and the proportions that made the flat feel Edwardian in the first place survived intact.
It taught us to look properly at the space a home already has before thinking about adding more. Sounds obvious. It isn’t, apparently.
Opening up, but not wiping out
If we had a pound for every West London client who has asked us to open the kitchen onto the garden… well. It’s the brief we hear most.
In one Victorian house in Kensington we did exactly that, with internal walls out and big sliding doors to the garden. But we didn’t gut the place. The original details stayed where they were, and we picked new materials that could sit next to them comfortably instead of competing.
Strip out every cornice and every original door and you don’t end up with a modern house. You end up with a house that feels like something’s missing, even if visitors can’t quite put their finger on what.
On terraces we’ve often used a rear infill extension, building into that narrow side return next to the back addition. On the right house it turns a dark galley kitchen into a room people actually want to sit in, and the rest of the house barely needs touching.
Listed buildings
Different rules altogether.
Once a building is listed, every change has to be justified, and “it’ll look nicer” won’t get very far. In our experience, what makes the difference is showing that what’s historically there has been understood and respected.
Bryanston Square in Marylebone is a good example. A Grade II listed apartment where earlier proposals had run into difficulties before we came on board; we took it through planning and listed building consent. Round the corner at York Terrace, refurbishing roughly 177 square metres needed planning permission, listed building consent and conservation area consent, all three of them, and we stayed with that project from the first brief right through to completion.
What did we take away from both? Consent is really won, or lost, in the early drawings. Conservation officers can tell fairly quickly whether you understand a building or whether you’re trying to fight it.
Your borough matters more than you’d think
We work across Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Richmond, Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow and Ealing, and each of them reads conservation guidance in its own way, so a scheme that sails through in Ealing can turn into a proper negotiation in Kensington and Chelsea. We’ve learned never to assume that what was approved next door will be approved again, so we check the local guidance and recent decisions on the street before we draw anything.
The details
Cornices. Sash windows. Fireplaces.
Restoring them takes skilled people and a fair bit of hunting for the right materials. It’s slower, and often dearer, than replacing them. It’s also the first thing anyone notices when they walk through the door.
That said, keeping character isn’t always about being restrained. At Berkeley Court the Victorian love of grandeur was part of the building’s personality, so we went with bold chandeliers rather than playing it safe. Sometimes the respectful thing is to be as confident as the people who built the place.
Why we keep architecture and interiors together
At Payte Architects London, our architects and interior designers work on a project together from the start, and in an old house that isn’t a nice-to-have. A stone worktop might need the floor strengthening underneath it. A new pendant light can mean cutting into a historic ceiling. Where a radiator goes decides where the pipes run. Settling those questions early, together, is how we stop original features getting damaged halfway through a build.
Every period home is different. The right approach depends on the building, its history and the borough it sits in, so this piece shares what we’ve seen on our own projects and shouldn’t be taken as advice for any particular property.
