A kitchen extension in Notting Hill often starts with a question that gets skipped elsewhere: which floor the kitchen should actually be on. Many of these tall terraces have a cellar, garden-level or lower-ground floor beneath the main storeys, and where the kitchen sits down there it is a storey below the rooms the house entertains in — but where your own kitchen sits, and what the levels actually are, has to be established for the specific house rather than assumed from the type. Where that is the arrangement, it puts the kitchen next to the garden, which is what most owners want, but it also puts it below the entertaining floor and often under a lower ceiling than the storeys above it. Some households want to stay down there and extend outwards; others want the kitchen brought up to sit alongside the reception rooms, leaving the garden level for something quieter. The two briefs produce completely different projects — different drainage, different structure, different consent risk — and choosing between them is the first piece of work we do, before anybody draws a plan.
Once the level is settled, the compliant extract route helps organise the plan. Approved Document F's standard guidance provides for kitchen extract ventilation to discharge outdoors; a recirculating cooker hood on its own does not comply with that guidance. The applicable performance depends on whether the system is intermittent or continuous and whether the cooker hood itself extracts outside. The duct therefore needs a buildable route and an address-specific outdoor discharge position coordinated with the manufacturer's requirements, the building fabric, heritage significance and neighbour amenity. We fix that route early and design the kitchen around it rather than leaving it to the installer.
Drainage can quietly overrule a layout, but the answer comes from a survey rather than a Notting Hill rule of thumb. We establish the existing foul-drain invert, route, connection point, condition and ownership before fixing the sink and appliances, and use gravity drainage where feasible. If gravity cannot be achieved, the pumped solution is agreed with building control and the equipment manufacturer, including maintenance access, alarms and any backflow provision required by the selected system. Surface water is a separate planning issue: where permission is required, RBKC treats lower-ground and ground-floor rear or side extensions as development requiring SuDS, expects a drainage statement, and calls for green or blue provision on flat extension roofs subject to the site's planning and heritage constraints.
If an air-source heat pump, condenser or remote fan is proposed, the first step is establishing whether it falls within its own permitted-development route or needs an application. For a planning application involving external plant, RBKC's Noise SPD expects a noise survey and report prepared by a competent acoustician, assessing the equipment against background noise at the relevant sensitive windows, gardens, terraces or balconies. A permitted-development heat pump still has to meet its applicable siting and noise conditions. We coordinate acoustic mitigation, vibration isolation and any visual screening with the heritage design rather than assuming that an extension consent covers equipment added later.
The glazing needs the same discipline. Owners rightly want the new kitchen to open to the garden, and a broad glazed rear wall does exactly that — but a glass-fronted room that also contains an oven, a hob and a run of appliances is a heat-gain problem waiting to happen. We assess orientation, external shading, the glass specification and useful opening provision, prioritising passive measures in line with RBKC's cooling hierarchy. Where noise, security or privacy constrains opening, project-specific mechanical ventilation or cooling may form part of the strategy, but supplying mechanical fresh air is not an automatic substitute for purge ventilation or solar-gain control. We also test daylight and sunlight in retained and neighbouring rooms, privacy and enclosure because RBKC Policy CD9 applies those living-condition tests to extensions.
Tenure changes almost everything above. In one of Notting Hill's many converted houses, a relocated kitchen may connect to a shared soil stack, but that ownership and the available route have to be established by survey and lease review. The lease may require freeholder consent or a formal Licence to Alter for a new shared-service connection, external penetration or structural opening. A hard-surfaced kitchen with appliances over another home also raises impact-sound and plumbing-noise questions that need project-specific acoustic and lease checks. We confirm the conservation-area and listing position for the exact address and establish whether Part 1 permitted development applies to a whole house; it does not apply to an individual flat in a building containing one or more flats. Where planning permission is required, an extension to a house normally uses a householder application, while a material external alteration to a building containing flats uses a full planning application. We programme any Party Wall notices, private consents and the building regulations package alongside it. We do not promise approval; we remove avoidable reasons for refusal.
