A Highgate Terrace, Extended and Rebuilt Around the Neighbour’s Light

The Brief

This was a Victorian terraced house in Highgate that had stopped working for the people living in it. The ground floor was cut into small rooms with a narrow kitchen at the back, the loft was storage, and the house had never been properly serviced. The owners wanted more space and a plan that made sense, and they wanted it without moving.

We designed and built the whole of it: a side return extension, a loft conversion giving a bedroom and bathroom, and a full renovation throughout. One firm, one contract, from the first survey to handover. Planning permission was granted first time.

The Roof That Decided the Application

The obvious way to build a side return is with a flat roof. It is cheaper, it is quicker, and it is what most of them get. On this house it would also have put a solid parapet along the boundary and taken daylight from the neighbour behind it.

We pitched the roof instead, falling away from the boundary. It costs more and it takes longer, and it was the right decision on every count. The neighbour keeps their light. The rooflights sit in the slope and bring daylight deep into the middle of the plan, which is the part of a terraced house that is always darkest. And the scheme answered the objection most likely to be raised against it before anyone had the chance to raise it.

Loss of light to a neighbour is one of the commonest grounds for refusing a side return. Designing the roof around it, rather than defending a flat roof afterwards, is the reason this application went through without amendment.

A Ground Floor That Works as One Room

With the side return in, the back of the house became a single space: kitchen, dining and a seat by the garden doors. The brickwork down one side is new, laid in stock brick so the extension reads as part of the house rather than an addition bolted to it. Steel-framed glazing opens the whole of the rear wall to the garden.

The kitchen sits on the party wall side, where it does not interrupt the view through. Brass against a marbled splashback, a run of units and an island, and the working end of the room kept clear of the light coming in.

The Front Room, Rebuilt to Look Original

The front room needed everything: new sashes in the bay, new cornice, a new ceiling rose, a new fireplace surround. None of it is original and none of it pretends to be. It was chosen and set out to hold the character of a Victorian front room, because a house of this age looks wrong when it is stripped back to plain surfaces.

The test is not whether a detail is old. It is whether the room reads correctly. Deep skirtings, a proper cornice, a bay that still frames the street, and a floor and a colour that let the joinery do the work.

A Loft That Gained a Bedroom and a Bathroom

The loft gave a double bedroom with its own bathroom. The bathroom takes the slope of the roof, with a rooflight over the basin so the low side of the room is the bright side rather than the dead one. Terrazzo-effect tiling on the wet wall, a fluted vanity, and the fittings kept dark against it.

The main bathroom on the floor below took the same approach in a different key: twin basins on a single vanity, sage tile run vertically to lift the ceiling height, arched mirrors, and a walk-in shower with a ceiling-mounted head.

Drawn and Built by the Same Firm

The house was rewired and replumbed throughout, the plan was reworked on every floor, and every finish was new. Work of that scale usually runs across an architect, a structural engineer, a main contractor and a list of subcontractors, with the owner holding the gaps between them. Here it was one firm. We drew it, we submitted it, and our own trades built it, with our own structural engineer on the drawings from the start. Details like the tiled floor meeting the foot of the stair get resolved on site by the people who specified them, which is where most of the argument in a renovation usually happens.

If you are considering something similar on a Highgate house, the useful first step is a visit and a look at what the property will carry. See our architects in Highgate page for how schemes are assessed in N6, or get in touch and we will arrange a survey.

The Finished House

The same six photographs together, if the page is built with the images at the foot rather than through the copy.

The Project, In Pictures