Residential · Conservation Area
A sensitive residential project within one of London's most protected conservation areas. Studio Basheva navigated complex planning constraints to deliver a beautifully considered extension and interior refurbishment that respects the architectural language of the Suburb while providing a modern, light-filled home.
A family of six, moving from overseas, had bought a three-bedroom house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. They needed nine bedrooms.
That is the whole brief, and it is harder than it sounds. The house had three bedrooms and three bathrooms, an unconverted loft, and a layout carrying a good deal of wasted space. The Suburb is one of the most tightly controlled residential areas in London. Tripling the bedroom count inside it is not a matter of building bigger.
Work here needs consent from the local authority and, separately, from the Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust — and the garden and landscape treatment needed a third application to the Trust in its own right. The two bodies look at different things. The council is concerned with volume: massing, the shape of what you are adding, how far it projects. The Trust is concerned with fabric: retaining as much of the original as possible and matching proposed materials to what is already there. A scheme can satisfy one and fail the other.
We applied for a rear extension and a loft conversion. The Trust told us at the outset that the house was already maximised on its footprint. That answer came early, which was useful — it meant the bedrooms had to come from the roof and from reorganising what was already inside, not from pushing further into the garden.
With the loft carrying the new accommodation, its windows became the sticking point. The Trust's guidelines set fixed proportions for rooflights in the Suburb, and our design did not meet them. We amended the loft design to the guideline proportions rather than argue for an exception.
Three consents, in parallel rather than in sequence: a planning application to the council, a Trust application for the building works, and a separate Trust application for the garden and landscape.
The accommodation came from two places. The loft conversion added 20 sqm net — modest on its own, but it is the floor that made the arithmetic work. The rest came from the existing plan: reworking circulation and absorbing the wasted space the original layout had accumulated. The rear extension picked up what remained.
Where the Trust's guidelines were explicit, as with the rooflight proportions, we designed to them. Knowing which constraints are negotiable and which are not is most of the skill in the Suburb, and the rooflight dimensions are not.
A house of this size needed its services rethought rather than extended: underfloor heating throughout and contemporary air conditioning, both integrated during the refurbishment rather than added afterwards.
From three bedrooms and three bathrooms to nine bedrooms and seven bathrooms, with 20 sqm of net new floor area in the loft. Everything else came from the roof and from space the house already had but was not using.
Consent inside the year of commission, in an area with two consenting bodies and a third application for the landscape. The gap between approval and completion was the client's, not the planning system's — the project was paused over the pandemic for financial reasons and picked up afterwards.