The defining project in Shepherd’s Bush refurbishment is de-conversion: taking a terrace that was split decades ago into an upper and lower flat and reuniting it as one family house. The instinct is to treat this as decoration, but the governing question is tenure and the planning unit, not the finishes. Reducing two self-contained homes to one is a material change of use, and Hammersmith & Fulham, like most London boroughs, weighs the loss of a residential unit before granting it — the council is protecting its housing stock, so the case has to be made rather than assumed. We establish how many lawful dwellings the house currently comprises, examine whether the original conversion carried its own planning conditions and whether they remain live, and set the planning route before anyone draws a new single-home layout. Getting that sequence right is what separates a deliverable project from one that stalls at validation, because the consent, not the plan, decides whether the house can lawfully become one home again.
Reversing the physical conversion is a bigger job than most owners expect, and it shapes the whole programme. A house split into flats usually gained a second kitchen and bathroom stacked on the floors, a divided or duplicated front entrance, a separate meter, consumer unit and gas supply for each flat, and fire separation between the two units. Reuniting it means stripping those redundant service cores, reinstating a single staircase and hallway that reads as one continuous home, and rationalising the incoming supplies back to a single house so it is metered and serviced as one. We survey carefully what was added and what original fabric survives behind it, because the plan for a coherent single home depends entirely on which walls, floors and stairs are original Victorian structure and which are later conversion-era insertions that can safely come out. That distinction, established early, governs both the layout and the cost.
Period fabric is what a Shepherd’s Bush refurbishment either saves or quietly loses. These bay-fronted and flat-fronted terraces, and the larger three-storey houses near the Green, retain cornices, ceiling roses, panelled doors, deep skirtings, timber sash windows, cast fireplaces and original floorboards — details that decades as divided flats often buried under stud partitions, boxed-in services, suspended ceilings and layers of paint. We record room by room what remains, specify careful repair and reinstatement rather than wholesale replacement, and match new joinery to the surviving profiles so a repaired cornice or architrave is indistinguishable from the original. Where the house sits within the Wells or Askew conservation area, the sash windows, the roof and chimneys, and the front elevation are controlled, so those elements are restored to the original pattern rather than swapped for modern units — which is both what the designation expects and what keeps the street reading as a coherent Victorian terrace.
Upgrading the thermal performance of a solid-wall Victorian house is the technical heart of the work, and the easiest thing to get badly wrong. These terraces have single-leaf brick walls with no cavity to fill, so warmth is added instead by internal or, far more rarely, external insulation, by insulating the roof and the suspended timber ground floor, and by draught-proofing the sashes or adding discreet secondary glazing behind them. The risk is moisture: a solid brick wall relies on being able to dry outward, and an impermeable internal lining can hold condensation in the masonry and drive damp and rot into embedded joist ends and lintels. We design the build-up around vapour behaviour, choosing breathable materials where the physics demands them, and pair the fabric upgrade with controlled ventilation so the reunited house is genuinely warmer and drier rather than a wall assembly that quietly decays behind fresh plasterboard.
A whole-house refurbishment is also the single moment to renew everything hidden, while the house is open. With the fabric stripped back we coordinate a full rewire, a replumb and new heating, and we confront the damp, timber decay and tired structure that a divided, poorly ventilated house tends to accumulate over the decades — perished lintels over the bay windows, rot at the ends of buried floor joists, historic settlement cracking that has never been diagnosed. Mechanical ventilation, the position of the new boiler and plant, and the routing of pipes, cabling and ducts all have to be resolved against the surviving period fabric rather than hacked roughly through it, so services run within the structure without wrecking a cornice line or a run of original boards. The aim is a house that is sound, warm and fully serviced beneath the surface while every visible detail worth keeping is left intact.
The route to build is a coordinated one that we sequence from the outset. We survey the house, confirm the planning unit and any live conditions from the earlier conversion, and prepare the change-of-use or householder application wherever the dwelling count or a controlled external elevation is affected, then produce the building-regulations package covering structure, fire, insulation, ventilation and drainage for the reunited home. Removing conversion-era partitions, forming new structural openings and altering chimney breasts frequently involves the walls shared with the terrace neighbours on either side, which engages the Party Wall etc. Act 1996, so we identify the notifiable neighbours and serve notices early rather than letting them delay the build. Handled in the right order — tenure, planning, party wall, building control — the result is a single family house restored behind its Victorian front: warm, properly serviced and legible again as one home.
