A Fitzrovia refurbishment starts with tenure, not layout. The great majority of homes here are flats held on long leases, and structural or significant work almost always needs a Licence to Alter from the freeholder or managing agent before anything is built. That licence is a separate track from planning and building control, with its own drawings, method statements and often a surveyor acting for the landlord, and it can take longer than the statutory routes. Some leases also restrict working hours, require the deposit of an undertaking for costs, or ask for reinstatement conditions that shape the specification. We prepare the licence package alongside the design so freeholder consent is being negotiated in parallel rather than discovered as a blocker once a client has committed to a scope and a start date.
Acoustic separation is the technical spine of almost every flat refurbishment in this district. A home here typically has another flat below and often a commercial unit — a shop, studio or restaurant — somewhere in the same stack, and the lease usually carries obligations about noise transfer and floor finishes, sometimes an outright prohibition on hard flooring without consent. Relocating a kitchen or bathroom, or stripping back to a bare structural floor, forces the question of how impact and airborne sound are controlled between the dwellings, and mechanical services add their own structure-borne noise. We design the floor build-up, resilient layers and junction detailing to satisfy both the lease terms and Approved Document E, and we set finished floor levels around it, because a floor that fails on sound is the complaint that follows a refurbishment for years.
Where the home is one of Fitzrovia's Georgian or Victorian townhouses, the refurbishment is about rationalising a plan that has usually been altered many times, sometimes having served as offices or bedsits before returning to a single home. Chimney breasts, closet wings, original stair compartments and inserted partitions accumulate over a building's life, and a good refurbishment reads the surviving structure before removing anything. Opening up a ground floor means checking what is load-bearing, how the loads travel through the building to the foundations, and whether a steel beam or a padstone is needed — work a structural engineer designs and calculates. Where the house is listed, that plan form, the staircase and the joinery may themselves be protected, so the same move that is routine elsewhere can need consent here.
Services and risers decide what is actually possible inside a flat. Moving a bathroom or kitchen depends on where soil stacks, drainage falls and the building's risers run, and in a mansion block or converted house those routes are shared, fixed and often boxed into positions no one can move without collective consent. A new WC needs a viable connection to the stack at an adequate fall; an island kitchen may need a pumped waste; a relocated wet room needs tanking and a floor that can carry it. In a mixed-use stack, mechanical extract and ventilation must not conflict with the commercial extract rising from the premises below, which can dominate a shared riser. Where a home spans two former flats knocked together, the two sets of services rarely align, and reconciling them cleanly is often the hidden cost of the project. We survey the existing services early so the layout is designed around what the building can carry, not against it.
Listed-building internal consent is the risk most owners underestimate. Where a Fitzrovia building is listed, the control reaches inside — to joinery, cornicing, panelling, historic staircases, chimneypieces and the plan form itself — and works that affect that fabric can require consent even though nothing changes on the street. Carrying out such works without consent is a criminal offence, not merely a planning breach, which is why the position must be settled before any stripping-out begins. The listing entry and its extent should be checked for the exact address, and where consent is needed we prepare a heritage-led justification and the listed building consent drawings together with the wider refurbishment package, so the protected elements are recorded and the alterations are argued on their merits rather than assumed to be permitted.
Building regulations sit under the whole project even where planning does not apply. A refurbishment touches structure, fire safety, insulation, ventilation, drainage, stairs and, in wet areas, waterproofing, and in a flat within a larger building the fire strategy is a shared concern — compartmentation between dwellings, protected escape routes, the fire performance of any relocated entrance door and the interaction with the building's existing precautions all matter. Upgrading thermal and acoustic performance on solid Georgian construction also needs care to avoid trapping moisture in historic walls. We produce the building regulations drawings for construction, coordinate the structural engineer and any acoustic input, and align the whole package with the Licence to Alter conditions so the freeholder's surveyor, building control and the contractor are all working to one coordinated set of information. That coordination matters most in a shared building, where site access, deliveries and noisy work all have to be agreed with neighbours and the managing agent before the contractor starts.
