On Pimlico's leasehold stock the first question is never the design — it is the Licence to Alter. Your lease almost always reserves structural and services alterations to the freeholder's consent, and the managing agent will usually want a defined drawing set, a method statement and evidence that common parts are protected before granting it. Alterations to a separating wall or floor, moves of a soil or waste pipe, and anything affecting the block's structure or fire strategy typically need the freeholder's own surveyor or engineer to review, and that review is charged back to you. Leases vary widely between blocks, so what one freeholder waves through, another treats as a full structural submission with its own conditions. We read the lease, establish the managing agent's requirements and prepare the Licence to Alter drawings to the standard they expect, so the consent runs in parallel with the design rather than stalling it at the end.
The separating floor to the flat below is where a compact refurbishment lives or dies technically. Under the Building Regulations the floor between two dwellings must resist the passage of airborne and impact sound, and a bare joist-and-lath floor rarely meets it once you start again, especially if you are laying stone or engineered timber over it. We design an acoustic build-up — resilient layers, isolation battens and added mass where the ceiling height allows — that keeps footfall and hard-flooring noise out of the home beneath, and we protect the fire separation at the same time, because a separating floor is also a compartment boundary between two dwellings. The two requirements pull in the same direction but both eat depth, so getting them into the drawings early avoids losing head height late, which on a low-ceilinged central flat is space you cannot spare and cannot recover once the ceiling below is someone else's home.
Relocating a kitchen or bathroom is the move that most often runs into the building's services. In a flat the sink, appliances and any new wet area have to drain to the existing soil stack or riser with adequate fall, and cutting a new connection into a shared stack usually needs freeholder consent and coordination with the flats above and below. Concrete slabs limit how much fall you can build up under a floor, so a relocated kitchen or shower can be constrained by centimetres of drainage rather than by the plan you would prefer. Mechanical extract for a windowless internal bathroom or kitchen adds another route to solve, usually to an external wall or a dedicated riser rather than into the common ductwork. We map the stack, riser, extract and drainage falls first, then place the wet areas where the services genuinely reach, avoiding wet rooms directly over a neighbour's habitable space where the lease resists it.
Removing an internal wall to open up a compact plan means separating what is decorative from what is doing structural work. In a mansion-block flat or a terrace maisonette, some internal walls are load-bearing and others are the party structure shared with an adjoining dwelling, and cutting either changes what consents you need. A structural engineer designs any beam or padstone, and where the work touches a party wall the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 brings the neighbouring owners into the process with notices that sit outside the freeholder's licence. We identify which walls can go, which need support and which trigger a party wall notice at survey stage, so the layout is agreed on structural evidence rather than optimism. In a mansion block the separating structure is often masonry that carries the flats above, which narrows the openings you can safely form and shapes the whole plan.
The point of a Pimlico refurbishment is usually to make a small, central home feel more generous without extending it. That is a plan, joinery, lighting and services problem: borrowing light between rooms, integrating storage into thickened walls and reveals, setting a lighting scheme that lifts low ceilings, and coordinating pipe runs, ventilation and electrics so they disappear into the build-up rather than dropping bulkheads through the middle of a room. On this stock a few centimetres of considered plan efficiency reads as a whole extra function — a proper hallway, a usable second bedroom, a bath that finally fits. Where a stucco-fronted flat has tall original windows, we plan around retaining and repairing them rather than replacing them, both because they carry the room and because visible glazing changes are the part most likely to engage conservation control where the designation applies.
The delivery route is deliberately ordered around the block, not just the flat. We survey the existing home, confirm the lease restrictions and the managing agent's requirements, and develop a design that satisfies both the freeholder and the Building Regulations, then produce the Licence to Alter drawings and the building-regulations package for construction. Because the works happen inside a live building, protection of common parts, lift and stair access, permitted working hours and dust and noise control all belong in the documents, since the freeholder will hold you to them. We do not promise consent from any freeholder or the council, but we build the scheme so both requests are evidenced and coordinated rather than left to chance.
