The opening move on a West Hampstead refurbishment is not a survey of what the house looks like; it is a review of what the house is. NW6's Victorian and Edwardian terraces were converted in large numbers, and the result is a stock in which a top-floor home can feel like a house, occupy two storeys, have its own front door and still be a leasehold maisonette. The distinction is not pedantic. It determines whether householder permitted-development rights exist at all, whether the roof void above the top ceiling is yours to touch, whether the rear wall you want to open is demised to you, and whether the garden behind it belongs to the flat below. We ask for the lease and the title plan before we ask for a brief, because a refurbishment designed against the wrong ownership picture has to be redesigned, and usually after money has been spent.
Where the building is a leasehold flat or maisonette, the refurbishment runs on a consent route the freeholder controls as much as the council does. Structural alterations, changes to wet areas, new floor build-ups, penetrations through compartment floors and any work into the roof void will typically require a Licence to Alter, supported by drawings and technical information covering structure, acoustic separation, fire and services. Managing agents and freeholders in this stock also want evidence of what previous owners did — and that record is often incomplete, because the alterations that most affect your project are precisely the ones nobody registered. We gather the lease, the title plan, the demised extent, the freeholder's alteration rules and whatever alteration history exists, and we test the brief against them before drawing. The aim is a scheme that is consentable as well as buildable, because a design the freeholder will not licence is not a design at all, however well it works on paper.
Reunifying a previously converted house is a distinct project type in West Hampstead, and it is far more than removing a few internal doors. A conversion leaves fingerprints: a second entrance and lobby that now has to be undone, stacked kitchens and bathrooms on upper floors sitting over what will become bedrooms, duplicated consumer units and meters, a stair that was truncated or boxed in, fire-separating ceilings and floor build-ups added between the former flats, and drainage that was routed to serve two households rather than one. Some of that fabric is worth keeping — acoustic floor build-ups often are — and some has to come out. The honest way to plan a reunification is to open up and record before committing, rather than to draw an idealised house and hope the building agrees.
Fire strategy is the technical thread that most often reshapes a whole-house refurbishment here, and it is rarely in the client's brief. In a three- or four-storey terrace being brought back to single occupation, the escape route from the upper floors, the protection of the stair enclosure, the position of doors onto that stair and the alarm system all have to be resolved before an open-plan ground floor can be drawn — because it is usually the open plan that puts the stair at risk. Where a flat within a converted building is being refurbished, the obligation runs the other way: compartmentation to the neighbouring dwelling has to survive the work, so ceilings, floors and service penetrations that look like finishes are in fact fire-separating elements. We resolve that early, because it dictates the plan, not the other way round.
The frontage is where a West Hampstead refurbishment meets the conservation area, and windows are the battleground. Owners on the rail-corridor side of the area quite reasonably want a serious acoustic upgrade, and the specification that delivers it — heavier frames, thicker or asymmetric glazing, different opening patterns — is exactly the specification that can disturb the window rhythm of what the Fortune Green and West Hampstead Neighbourhood Plan describes as a homogeneous piece of Victorian and Edwardian domestic architecture. There is usually a way through: slim-profile units, retained or reinstated sightlines, secondary glazing where it can be concealed, and acoustic attention paid to the elements that are not publicly visible. But the case has to be made with existing and proposed elevations, window sections and a material schedule, not with a builder's product list. A frontage decision made on price alone is the one most likely to fail.
From there the project becomes a matter of sequence and evidence. We survey, open up where we need to, and establish the tenure, structural and fire position before design fixes anything expensive. We then develop the layout, coordinate the structural engineer, resolve services routes against risers, floor voids and existing drainage, and produce the planning drawings the external scope requires and the building regulations package the whole scheme requires. Where the property is leasehold, the Licence to Alter runs alongside; where the terrace is shared, party wall notices are issued in time to matter. Phasing and occupation are then decided rather than hoped for: a full refurbishment of an NW6 terrace usually runs faster decanted, while a flat is constrained by access windows, protection of common parts, working hours and the freeholder's conditions. We write that into a technical design and tender package, so the contractor prices the programme you actually intend.
