Renovations in Soho

Almost every Soho flat we renovate sits above a business that stays open while we work, and that single fact drives everything else. The buildings around Dean Street, Berwick Street Market and towards Carnaby Street are period terraces that were never residential the way a suburban street is: trade at ground level, storage above it, flats above that, all altered repeatedly for two centuries. Nothing is where a drawing says it is. We start every job here by opening up and looking, because assuming a standard arrangement in W1 is how budgets come apart in week two.

Living above a trading ground floor

Fire separation between the commercial floor and the flats above is the issue that comes up most, and the one most often missed. Ceilings have been altered, service penetrations cut and never sealed, original lath and plaster replaced piecemeal. Any renovation that opens a floor up is the chance to put that right properly, and building control will look at it. We coordinate the application and the inspections, and we would far rather raise a compartmentation problem while the ceiling is down than quietly board over it. Doing it once, properly, is cheaper than being asked for it later.

Noise runs the other way too. A restaurant extract below a bedroom, deliveries at six in the morning and late trading are all part of the building, and a renovation is the moment to improve acoustic performance in floors and upgrade glazing where the lease allows it. Most flats around Soho Square are leasehold, so the freeholder's written consent comes before the design is fixed, and the lease often imposes working hours tighter than anything the council would require. Agreeing hours before the design is settled avoids an awkward conversation in week one.

Two centuries of alteration

Soho buildings have been subdivided, joined, partly rebuilt and reconfigured so many times that an internal wall tells you very little from the surface. A plastered partition may be a modern stud, a brick wall carrying two floors, or a timber frame packed with rubble. That is why a structural engineer is appointed early and given real access rather than a set of assumptions. We open up, they survey, and the beam and bearing design comes from them. We install to it and prop while load transfers. Nothing is cut until that design is in our hands.

Floor levels rarely match between rooms, staircases are steeper and narrower than modern standards allow, and services from four different decades often share one void. A realistic renovation here budgets for what appears once the finishes come off. We price the known work firmly and identify the unknowns openly rather than burying them in a headline figure, and one named project manager means decisions about whatever has just been uncovered get made quickly instead of holding up the trades. An old building rewards patience and punishes assumption, and the programme should reflect it.

Getting materials in and waste out

There is no rear access, no driveway and frequently no lift. Everything reaches a Soho flat through a street door and a narrow shared stair, so materials arrive in small loads inside a loading window and waste leaves bagged, by hand, at agreed times. A skip needs a permit from Westminster City Council and on many of these streets it is simply not workable. That is not a detail. It sets the pace of the entire job and it belongs in the programme from day one. Underestimating it is the commonest reason a flat here runs late.

The stair and the entrance get protected before anything else happens, because they are shared and because damage to them is the fastest way to sour a relationship with the freeholder. Deliveries are timed around trading hours below. Dust is contained at source rather than chased around afterwards. We are fully insured, and the managing agent will want that in writing along with our method and hours before the first delivery turns up. We would rather over protect a shared stair than repair one, and the cost of doing so is trivial beside the goodwill it buys.

Where most Soho projects start: whole-house refurbishment in Soho, everything we cover across Westminster, renovations in Marylebone, renovations in Mayfair and renovation order of works.