A refurbishment in South Hampstead is settled by tenure before it is settled by design. The stock here runs from single-family houses on the ordered red-brick streets to mansion blocks, purpose-built apartment buildings and large houses long since converted into flats, and the consequence is unusual: the same street can hold a single-family house whose project turns almost entirely on visible exterior works, and a mansion flat with no external change whatsoever but a dense stack of technical controls behind the front door. The address, not the area, decides which evidence pack you actually have to build. So the first thing we establish is not a layout or a moodboard but ownership, demise and designation — who owns the elevation you want to alter, what the lease permits you to cut into, whether the conservation area covers the property, and what the Article 4 controls reach. Every downstream decision, from the scope of the survey to the drawings that get produced, follows from that fork.
Where the property is a single-family house, the refurbishment is Article 4-led. Camden's Article 4 material covering Hampstead, South Hampstead and Belsize is described as applying to the fronts and street-facing sides of single-family houses and converted flats, and to front boundaries including walls, gates and fences. In practice that captures exactly what a refurbishment reaches for: windows and doors, porches, railings, hard surfaces to the front, roof alterations where the roof reads from the street, and any exterior plant or vent that lands on a controlled face. Permitted development cannot be treated as the default on those elevations, and the position should be confirmed for the exact address rather than inferred from a neighbour's completed job. Where consent is engaged, the deliverable is a proper one: existing and proposed elevations, a joinery and materials schedule, frontage photographs and a written conservation explanation of why the proposal sits comfortably against the ordered character of the street. We set out the case on evidence. We do not promise approval.
Where the property is a mansion flat, a converted-house flat, a maisonette or a lateral apartment, the refurbishment is leasehold-led, and the freeholder is the harder audience. A Licence to Alter is normally required, and a managing agent will reject a thin pack. What they expect is technical substance: acoustic floor build-ups that actually meet the lease standard, fire stopping and fire separation between demises, structural openings supported by an engineer's design and calculations, wet-area moves with drainage falls that genuinely work, riser routes, waterproofing to bathrooms and wet rooms, ventilation, protection of the common parts, and a contractor's method statement covering access, deliveries, hoisting and working hours. The classic failure here is treating a mansion-flat refurbishment as only interior design, when the acoustic, fire, structural, drainage and building-control evidence is what actually decides it. We assemble that pack in parallel with the design, not after it, because the freeholder's conditions routinely reshape a layout.
Converted flats in South Hampstead often contain inherited alterations, and that is the most consistently under-priced risk in a refurbishment here. An earlier conversion may already have moved kitchens and bathrooms, cut structural openings, weakened the fire separation between demises, or run drainage in ways nobody has drawn since. What an owner inherits is neither the original building nor a documented one, and a new scheme drawn over an undocumented base will find the problem during the strip-out, at the worst possible moment for the programme. A refurbishment survey here therefore has to be partly forensic: open up where you can, trace the existing drainage and riser positions, establish the real floor build-up rather than the assumed one, and find out what the previous conversion actually did before a single wall is drawn in a new position. The records to gather are specific — current and historic conservation-area references, the lease and managing-agent rules, window and frontage photographs, floor build-ups, riser positions, fire information and any previous flat alterations.
The crossover that catches owners is that an internal decision becomes an external planning problem. Moving a bathroom, kitchen or utility is an interior move on a plan, but it commonly requires an external vent, a new penetration or a changed riser — and where that lands on a conservation-area elevation, or on a shared mansion-block elevation that no single leaseholder controls, the penetration is the thing that has to be justified to two audiences at once. Drainage falls compound it: a wet room cannot simply be relocated to a position where the fall does not exist, and boxing a new soil route through fabric you do not own the shell of is a lease question as much as a plumbing one. So the service strategy — vent terminations, riser routes, drainage falls, waterproofing zones and acoustic build-ups — is fixed before layouts are frozen, rather than discovered after the finishes are priced and the only viable vent turns out to land on a face that nobody will consent to.
The order of work follows the fork. We confirm the conservation and Article 4 position and the tenure for the specific address; we gather the historic references, the lease and the technical records; we survey the building for what it actually is rather than what the floorplan claims; and only then do the deliverables split. On a house that means planning drawings and conservation evidence for whatever external scope survives the Article 4 check. On a flat it means a Licence to Alter pack built to withstand a managing agent's technical review. In both cases it means a building regulations package covering structure, fire safety, insulation, ventilation, drainage, stairs and waterproofing, coordinated with a structural engineer and, where a party structure is cut into or an excavation comes within three or six metres of a neighbour's structure, with a party wall surveyor under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996. We present what the evidence supports, and we say plainly where it does not. We do not promise approval.
