A whole-house refurbishment is the project owners most often assume needs no permission, and in Hammersmith it is the project whose risk sits almost entirely outside the room being decorated. The reason is that a refurbishment does not stay inside. Somewhere in the scope there is a sash window that has to be replaced, a front door that has failed, a railing being reinstated, a boundary wall being repointed, a roof slope being re-covered. Those are exactly the elements a conservation-area control or an Article 4 direction can catch in this borough. And if the building happens to be one of the listed houses near St Peter's Square, the inside is controlled too, and the strip-out itself becomes the regulated act. So the first drawing on a Hammersmith refurbishment is not a layout. It is a schedule of what the works actually touch, tested against what the address is subject to, so that nothing external is renewed on an assumption.
Tenure decides which route you are on, and it is settled before anything else. Hammersmith's period houses have been split into maisonettes and flats to an unusual degree, so a great many refurbishments here are not house projects at all. A freehold house is the simplest case: the council, building control and your neighbours. A leasehold flat is a different project wearing the same name. Permitted development does not apply to flats and maisonettes, so nothing is ever automatically allowed — but a wholly internal refurbishment may need no planning consent and still be stopped dead by a lease. Leases commonly govern structural alteration, the position of wet areas, floor construction and finishes, and any interference with shared services, and the freeholder's consent is what resolves them. We read the lease and the title before the design, because a beautiful scheme you are not contractually permitted to build is not a scheme.
Then the building has to be opened up honestly. The most dangerous document on a refurbishment is a fixed price agreed against an unopened house. Behind the plaster of a Victorian terrace there may be earlier alterations nobody recorded, wiring of several vintages, drainage of unknown condition, timber that has been quietly working for decades, and a structure that previous owners have cut into more than once — often when the house was divided into flats. We survey properly first: measured, opened up where we responsibly can, with services traced and drainage tested, then we build the scope, the programme and the contingency around what is found rather than around what is hoped. Where the house is one of the listed St Peter's Square properties, this sequence is not merely prudent, it is the law — the consent has to be in place, and the record of what existed made, before the fabric is disturbed.
With the building open, the services strategy quietly determines everything else. A whole-house refurbishment is the one chance in a generation to route the electrics, heating, hot water, ventilation and drainage properly, and in a Victorian house those routes are hard-won: chases into historic or protected fabric may be restricted, floor zones are shallow, and there is rarely a vertical shaft where a modern designer would want one. So the riser positions, the service voids, the plant location and future maintenance access have to be resolved on drawings before first fix, not negotiated by an electrician with a chisel. In a flat carved from a larger house those routes are not even yours — they run into shared risers and stacks that belong to the freeholder, and a services shutdown affecting the rest of the building is something a managing agent will want notice of. We coordinate services, structure and protected fabric as a single exercise, because in a tight period building they all want the same few hundred millimetres.
Owners rightly want a refurbished Hammersmith house to be warm and cheap to run, and that ambition meets historic fabric head on. Where a survey establishes that the external walls are of solid rather than cavity construction — common in this Victorian stock — insulating them internally moves the dew point into the wall build-up, and a wall that has spent its life drying inwards can begin to hold moisture instead. The result — interstitial condensation, damp, decaying embedded joist ends, ruined plaster — arrives years after the builder has left. The safe route is a designed one: understand how the wall currently handles moisture, choose a build-up that can manage vapour rather than trap it, treat the reveals and junctions where cold bridges concentrate, and pair any airtightness improvement with deliberate ventilation. Windows complicate it further, since replacement can be a consent matter where an Article 4 direction or a listing applies, and a well-detailed secondary system is sometimes the better heritage and thermal answer at once.
Finally, a Hammersmith refurbishment is a logistics project with a house attached, and it engages the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 even without an extension. Cutting into a party wall, taking out a chimney breast, bearing a new beam into a shared wall, or excavating within three or six metres of a neighbour's structure to lower a floor or underpin are all notifiable events, and on a terrace the neighbours are on both sides. The Act runs separately from planning: notices are served before work starts, and where a neighbour dissents, appointed surveyors produce an award. The job is also long, loud and dusty, so access, deliveries, protection of common parts, working hours, dust control and neighbour management belong in the tender information before a contractor prices, and that same list often reappears as a condition of a freeholder's consent. We survey, confirm the consents that genuinely apply, prepare any planning and listed building applications, build the freeholder pack separately, and produce the building regulations and tender drawings the contractor prices. We are candid about the risks, and we do not promise approval.
