A Fulham kitchen extension is really a plan problem before it is a building problem. The borough's Victorian and Edwardian terraces are long and narrow, and the kitchen almost always lands at the back of the house where the plan is deepest and darkest. Adding floor area at the rear is the easy part; the design work is making a single, connected kitchen-diner that stays usable through its whole depth rather than pushing all the life to the glazed garden end and leaving a dead, sunless middle. We begin by mapping how you actually want to cook, eat and move — where the run of units sits, whether an island earns its space, how the table relates to the garden doors — and let that use, not the footprint, set the shape of the room.
On a terrace only a few metres wide, every decision competes for the same limited width, so the layout has to be resolved before the structure is fixed. An island reads well in photographs but needs clear circulation on all sides, and on a narrow Fulham plan it can choke the route between the hob, the table and the garden if it is dropped in without that discipline. We test the working triangle, the walkways and the sightlines at feasibility, decide whether the utility, larder and coats are absorbed into the extension or held back in the original return, and place the dining zone where it still gets daylight. The aim is a room that works as one space but reads as distinct areas, so the middle of the plan is lived in rather than a corridor between two better rooms.
Daylight is the currency of a rear kitchen extension, and how you spend it depends entirely on the layout. A full wall of glazing to the garden lights the dining end beautifully but does little for the cooking run set against a flank wall or for the older rooms retained behind the new space. We plan the glazing around the plan: garden doors and a picture window where people sit and look out, rooflights driving daylight down onto the worktop and into the deep middle of the terrace, and often a rooflight or high window kept back over the threshold with the original house so the room that used to be the back reception is not left in permanent shade. Getting that balance right is what separates a bright, even kitchen from a gloomy, over-glazed box that is dazzling at one end and dark at the other.
Rooflights do most of the heavy lifting for daylight on a Fulham kitchen, but they carry their own constraints. Set into a single-storey flat roof they can, depending on their position and the fall of neighbouring gardens, create views into or from adjoining properties, so we check the overlooking geometry before fixing them rather than after a neighbour objects. Large areas of horizontal glass also gain heat quickly, and a south- or west-facing rear can turn a kitchen uncomfortable in summer, so the glazing specification, any solar control and the opening strategy are designed together. A working kitchen has to shed heat, steam and cooking smells as well, so we plan the cross-ventilation, the openable rooflights and the extract route early, because retrofitting a duct through a finished ceiling is disruptive and rarely tidy.
Turning the back of a Fulham terrace into an open kitchen-diner usually means removing the original rear wall and often part of a spine wall or chimney breast, which a structural engineer designs as a beam or a goalpost frame bearing onto the flanks. The interesting coordination is where that structure meets the kitchen: a downstand beam can clash with tall units or a run of rooflights, so the beam depth, the ceiling line and the cabinetry are resolved together rather than in sequence. Below the finish, the services matter just as much — the run for the extractor, the waste for a sink or an island, underfloor heating and the sockets an island needs are all set out before the slab and screed go down. We draw these together so the built kitchen matches the designed one and the floor sits level and flush to the garden threshold.
The route to a built kitchen is a coordinated one. We survey the house and the garden, test two or three plan options against daylight, structure and the way you live, then develop the scheme into planning drawings for Hammersmith & Fulham and, once the principle is settled, a building regulations package covering structure, drainage, ventilation, insulation and the glazing. Because these are terraces, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 almost always applies with neighbours on both sides — beams bearing into a party wall, or excavation near it, trigger notices that run separately from planning and are best started early. Where the extension crosses or sits near a public drain, a build-over agreement with the water authority may also be needed, confirmed for your specific run. We coordinate the lot so the kitchen you approve is the kitchen that gets built.
