In an Islington terrace the kitchen extension almost always starts with the same problem: a narrow galley and a separate back room, cut off from a garden that often sits half a level down or straight off the closet wing. The side return — the strip of external space beside the back addition — is frequently the only room to gain, and infilling it is what turns two mean spaces into a single kitchen-diner. We design that room first: where the run of units and the island sit, how far the extension can project before it darkens a neighbour's window, and where the roof glazing lands to bring light deep into a plan that is naturally long and thin.
The move to open-plan turns on the structural opening to the rear. Removing the original back wall — often a load-bearing masonry wall carrying the floors above — needs a beam sized by a structural engineer and, on a terrace, careful thought about how its bearings land on the party walls shared with both neighbours. We coordinate that opening with the extension's own structure and foundations, because the two are usually built as one operation. On closely set Islington plots this is also where the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 bites: excavation near a boundary and cutting into a party wall trigger notices that run alongside planning and should be programmed early rather than discovered on site.
Islington's converted-house flats pose a different version of the same brief. Here the kitchen often cannot extend outward at all, so the work is an in-flat relocation: moving the kitchen to a better-lit or better-connected room within the demise. The constraints are servicing and sound. A relocated kitchen needs a new drainage and soil-stack run that falls to the existing stack, ideally without crossing another flat's ceiling void, and — where the kitchen sits over another dwelling — an acoustic floor build-up that satisfies both building control and the lease's noise terms. We resolve the drainage route, the floor make-up and the freeholder's Licence to Alter before the layout is fixed.
From there the route is a coordinated one. We survey the property, test the kitchen-diner against the daylight, structural and — for flats — servicing constraints, and develop a design an Islington case officer or a freeholder can support, then produce the planning drawings and, once the principle is settled, the building-regulations package for construction. Whether the answer is a side-return infill, a full-width rear extension or an in-flat move, keeping the kitchen-diner and its servicing at the centre of the design is what makes the finished space work as hard as the plan promised — and what keeps the approvals straightforward rather than reactive.
