A kitchen project in Lancaster Gate starts with the fixed footprint, not a garden. There is no rear plot to extend into on a mansion flat or a converted terrace, so the useful question is what the existing walls, the risers and the stack will let you rearrange. The original kitchen in these buildings often sits away from the frontage, tucked against an internal wall where the drainage was first run, and the brief is usually to open it into adjoining living space or move it to make a better plan. Before any layout is drawn we survey where the soil stack, the risers and the existing waste runs actually are, because in an apartment those services — not the room shape — decide what is genuinely possible. Two flats in the same building can offer completely different scope depending on which one owns the run of the stack, whether an earlier owner has already moved the kitchen once, and how much ceiling void the storey height leaves for waste falls. We record all of that before proposing a plan, so the design starts from the building as it is rather than an idealised one.
The soil stack is the single most consequential constraint. A sink, a dishwasher and a washing machine all need waste that runs to the stack at an adequate fall, and there is a practical limit to how far a run can be dragged across a flat before the floor build-up needed to keep the fall becomes unacceptable or a pumped solution is forced on the design. Moving a kitchen to the far side of a flat, away from the stack, is where projects quietly become expensive or impossible. We fix the wet zone against the stack position first and plan the rest of the kitchen around it, rather than placing the island where it looks best and discovering later that the waste cannot get there.
Extraction is the constraint that most often meets the outside of the building, and on a stucco frontage that matters. A kitchen wants a real extract route, but a visible external vent, grille or flue on a formal elevation is precisely the change that conservation context governs and that a freeholder is likely to resist. The honest answers are routing extract to a shared riser where the building has one and the freeholder permits it, using a recirculating specification where an external terminus cannot be justified, or finding a discreet terminus on a non-sensitive elevation. Each has consequences for the kitchen's performance and for the consents needed, so we resolve the extract strategy early rather than assuming a vent can simply be punched through a wall. A recirculating hood keeps the frontage untouched but asks more of the filtration and of the cooking you plan to do; a riser route depends entirely on the building already having a shared duct with spare capacity and a freeholder willing to license its use. We establish which of those the specific building actually supports before the kitchen layout is fixed.
The floor is where a kitchen in a flat becomes a neighbour's problem. Relocating a kitchen puts a hard, busy, appliance-heavy room over someone else's ceiling, and impact and appliance noise travel straight down unless the floor build-up is designed to stop it. An acoustic floor — a resilient build-up that separates the new finish from the structure below — is typically both a building-regulations expectation and a lease obligation, and it competes for the same few centimetres of height that the drainage falls also want. Waterproofing sits in the same zone: a kitchen is a wet room in all but name, and the tanking and detailing that protect the flat below have to be coordinated with the acoustic layer and the waste falls, not added afterwards.
Removing an internal wall to open the kitchen into living space is structural work, even inside a flat. In a converted terrace or a mansion block the wall you want gone may be carrying load from the flats above, so the replacement is a designed beam on padstones, sized and calculated by a structural engineer, with temporary works planned before anything is propped. Where that wall or the floor and ceiling around it is a party structure shared with an adjoining flat, the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 can apply between flats, and notices are served in their own right, separately from the leasehold consent. We settle the structural scheme and identify any notifiable neighbours at design stage, because a beam and a party-structure notice discovered mid-build are programme problems, not details.
House or flat, the sequence we run is deliberately front-loaded, and in Lancaster Gate it is unmistakably a flat sequence. We measure the apartment, locate the stack, risers and existing drainage, establish the designation position for the exact address with Westminster before anything external is contemplated, and read the lease so the freeholder's and managing agent's requirements are known from the start. Then we test the kitchen layout against the stack, the acoustic floor, the extract route and any structural opening, before any of it becomes a Licence to Alter drawing and, later, the building-regulations package a contractor prices from. The difficult facts — a stack in the wrong place, a floor that cannot take the build-up, an extract with nowhere honest to go — arrive while they are still cheap to design around. We do not promise approval or consent on any route; we put the strongest case the flat and the lease will carry.
