Building work in Barnes: area guide

This is our area guide to building work in Barnes (SW13, Richmond upon Thames): the housing, the council rules that apply (Richmond Council for planning) and every service we offer here. For whole-house refurbishment go to Home renovation in Barnes.

Barnes has two quite different kinds of house sitting on the same streets: small period cottages with tight floor plans, and substantial family homes built or enlarged for a very different way of living. They route to opposite jobs. In the cottages the work is recovering space that already exists, usually by taking masonry out, while in the larger houses it is making a plan that has grown by accretion work as one home. We cover both across SW13, around Barnes Common, Barnes Pond and the roads down towards Barnes Bridge and the London Wetland Centre.

Barnes counts roughly 9,740 homes for Council Tax; 51% are older than 1919, 17% interwar and 31% post-war, with 48% flats and 52% houses. VOA Council Tax stock of properties, March 2025, for North Barnes and Mortlake & South Barnes. Counts rounded by the VOA.

Cottages: recovering space that is already there, masonry first

In a small cottage a chimney breast can take a substantial bite out of a room with none to spare, and removing it on both floors often gains more usable area than any extension would. That makes it a chimney breast removal job, not a hammer and hope. Whatever sits above the section taken out has to be carried, on steel built into the flanking walls, or a designed bracket support where the engineer and building control accept it, and if the stack is shared with next door, party wall notices apply before anything is touched.

The other recoverable space is behind assumptions: a bathroom stuffed into the closet wing, a hallway wider than it needs to be, an understairs cupboard that could be a cloakroom, a rear wall that could open properly to the garden, which is RSJ installation. Ceiling heights are modest, so any new floor build up has to be counted, and low first floor windows limit how far a rear opening can grow. We measure all of it before proposing a layout, because in a cottage a hundred millimetres in the wrong place genuinely matters.

Larger houses and getting onto the peninsula: one plan, then the steel

The bigger family houses need the opposite. Decades of separate additions leave a kitchen in the wrong place, a utility that used to be a scullery, a reception room nobody enters and services extended rather than replaced. That is a home renovation job: one coherent plan, then the structural work, rewire and replumb in a single sequence rather than the four separate campaigns that created the problem. Steel goalposts at the rear and a properly sized opening between the principal rooms, the open-plan conversion part, do most of the heavy lifting.

Access shapes the programme in SW13 more than the size of the house does. The roads onto Barnes are limited and the approaches carry heavy commuter traffic, so deliveries are timed off peak and vehicles kept to what the street will take. Parking is controlled on most roads, skip permits come from Richmond Council, and where there is no side access every barrow of spoil crosses the hallway. We board and protect that route on day one and keep it clear, because it is the artery for the entire job.

Where to go next for work in Barnes: house extensions in Barnes, the Richmond upon Thames area guide, building work in Chiswick, building work in Hammersmith and How to Plan a Renovation.