What the Commission Covers
A whole-house refurbishment is the point at which repairing a house stops making sense and rebuilding it from the inside becomes the cheaper course. The floors come up, the plaster comes off, the services go out in skips, and what remains is the masonry shell, the roof, the party walls and whatever original fabric is worth keeping. Everything after that is new work carried out inside a listed or conservation-area envelope.
For most of the houses on the Holland Park estate that means five to seven storeys of stucco-fronted terrace or semi-detached villa, built between about 1840 and 1880, altered at least twice since, and carrying a century and a half of accumulated compromise. Lath and plaster patched with pink gypsum. A rear closet wing that was extended in the 1930s and again in the 1990s. Wiring that runs in three different decades of conduit. A boiler serving twelve radiators that were sized for a house with open fires.
The commission covers the lot: survey, drawings, consent, structural works, full replacement of services, restoration of the original fabric worth restoring, new joinery and finishes throughout, and the landscaping of front and rear. One contract, one programme, one point of contact.
What a House of This Age Is Actually Hiding
The survey exists because the drawings never match the building. On a house of this period the recurring findings are consistent enough to predict, and expensive enough to matter if nobody looks for them before the price is agreed.
Bressummer beams over the rear opening that have been notched for pipework by three separate trades. Floor joists built into the party wall with no restraint. A basement with a bitumen tanking layer applied in the 1980s that has debonded and is now holding water against the brick rather than away from it. Chimney breasts removed at second floor with the stack above left sitting on nothing but the neighbouring flue withes. Dry rot behind the stucco where a downpipe has been leaking into the wall for a decade.
None of this is unusual, and none of it is a reason not to proceed. It is a reason to open up early, before the contract sum is fixed, so that the provisional sums attach to real conditions rather than to optimism.
- Opening-Up Survey
- Lifting boards and cutting inspection hatches at agreed positions, so the structure is priced from what is there rather than from what the drawings show.
- Schedule of Condition
- A photographic record of the house and its neighbours before work starts. It settles most party wall disputes before they become disputes.
- Asbestos Refurbishment Survey
- A legal requirement before intrusive work. Artex, pipe lagging, cistern bodies and floor tiles are the usual finds in a house last refitted in the 1960s or 1970s.
- Drainage Survey
- CCTV of the below-ground runs. Shared Victorian drainage under a terrace is common, and it governs where a new rear extension can and cannot go.
Structure
Most whole-house schemes in this part of London involve some structural remodelling, because the plan of a Victorian house does not suit the way anyone now lives in one. The kitchen wants to go down to the lower ground and open to the garden. The principal suite wants two rooms knocked into one with a dressing room behind. The closet wing wants rebuilding. Each of those is a steel frame, a pad foundation, a temporary works design and a building control sign-off.
Where the house is listed, the structural scheme and the consent scheme are the same conversation. A steel that requires a chimney breast to come out at three levels is a listed building consent matter, not simply an engineering one, and it is far cheaper to find that out at design stage than after the frame is fabricated.
Underpinning belongs here too, whether it is local underpinning to take a new opening down, or the full sequenced underpinning of a basement scheme. It is the single most disruptive operation a terraced house can undergo, and the one most likely to bring a neighbour and a surveyor into the programme.
Services
Services are where the budget quietly goes, and where a refurbishment either works for the next thirty years or becomes a maintenance problem within five. A full replacement covers the incoming supplies, the distribution, and everything drawing off it.
Electrical work means a new consumer unit and full rewire, circuits sized for a house that now runs a lift, a plant room, a wine store and an electric vehicle charger, and a lighting installation designed rather than defaulted. Lighting design matters more in these houses than in almost any other building type, because a room with a fourteen-foot ceiling and a run of original cornice cannot take downlights without being ruined by them.
Mechanical work means heating and hot water sized properly, comfort cooling where it can be concealed, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, and underfloor heating on the lower ground where the floor build-up allows it. In a house with sash windows and solid walls, the thermal strategy is a matter of judgement rather than a matter of specification. Internal wall insulation applied to a solid brick wall without a considered vapour strategy will cause interstitial condensation and rot the joist ends built into it.
The plant has to live somewhere. On a house without a basement, that is the single hardest planning problem in the whole refurbishment, and it is usually solved with a vault under the front pavement or a plant room carved out of the rear lower ground.
Programme and Phasing
A whole-house refurbishment of a five-storey Holland Park house runs twelve to twenty-four months on site, and the design and consent period before it runs six to twelve months on top. A listed building with a basement can exceed both.
The sequence is unglamorous and rarely varies. Scaffold and enclose. Strip out. Structural works and underpinning. Roof and external envelope. First fix of services. Plaster. Second fix. Joinery. Decoration. Floors. Snagging. The two stages that most often slip are the structural works, where the opening-up finds something, and the joinery, where a six-month lead time on a staircase or a set of doors was agreed at the wrong point in the programme.
Nobody lives in a house through this. Owners decant, and the honest position is to plan for the decant to last a quarter longer than the programme says.
One Team, or Several
The model where an owner appoints an architect, a contractor, a joinery firm and an interior designer separately, and holds the gaps between them, works when the owner is a developer with a project manager on staff. On a private house it tends to produce a job where every party is individually blameless and the house is still not finished.
The alternative is a practice that holds the whole commission under one contract, so the survey, the drawings, the consent applications, the party wall process, the build and the interior sit with one team, and the interfaces between them are their responsibility rather than yours. Several of the practices in the network work that way. Others are specialists who come in alongside an architect you have already appointed.
Which of the two suits you depends on the house, the scope, and how much of the process you want to hold yourself. That is what the first conversation is for, and it is the question that decides which introduction is worth making.