Renovations in Holland Park

Holland Park is a neighbourhood of large Victorian villas and houses arranged around garden squares, and both of those facts shape how a renovation runs. The houses are generous, with wide rear returns and rooms big enough to justify serious structural alteration. What they rarely have is a way in from the back, so everything arrives through the front door and leaves the same way. GS Renovation plans projects along Holland Park Avenue and the streets near the Kyoto Garden around that reality, appointing the structural engineer early so the steel specification is settled before anyone works out how to carry it into the room.

Side Returns, Rear Returns and Wide Openings

The standard villa plan puts a front room, a rear room and a return wing under one roof, with a narrow strip of ground running beside the return down to the garden. Infilling that strip and taking out the return's flank wall is the single most transformative thing you can do to one of these houses, and it is also the most structurally involved. That flank wall carries the return roof and often part of the first floor, so removing it usually calls for a goalpost arrangement of two beams and a column rather than a single lintel.

New foundations for the infill sit alongside footings that are shallow and were never designed to have anything dug next to them, so the engineer sets a depth and a sequence for excavating in short bays rather than in one open trench. Drainage almost always crosses the strip, which means a gully or an inspection chamber has to be relocated or built over, and building over a public sewer needs an agreement with the water authority. Rainwater from the new roof also has to go somewhere that the existing system can actually take.

Communal Gardens and the Front Door Route

Where a house backs onto a communal garden there is no vehicle access to the rear at all. Scaffolding has to be carried through the hallway in components and built by hand, spoil comes back out the same way, and the garden itself needs boarding and protection before anyone stands a standard on it. Garden committees generally set their own conditions about working hours, storage and reinstatement of turf and planting, and those are worth agreeing in writing before the first delivery rather than negotiating them with a scaffold already half erected and a neighbour watching.

That access reality feeds straight back into the structural design. A beam that cannot be carried through a hallway and up a staircase is the wrong beam, however elegant it looks on a drawing, so the engineer is told about the route at the survey and specifies accordingly, whether that means a spliced section, an extra column to shorten the span, or a lighter grade at a reduced clear opening. The same thinking applies to plasterboard sizes, bath dimensions and anything else that has to turn a half landing. Working all of this out at design stage costs an hour. Working it out on delivery day costs a fortnight.

Where most Holland Park projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Holland Park, everything we cover across Kensington and Chelsea, renovations in Kensington, renovations in Chelsea and building regulations explained.