End-terrace house extension outwards and upwards

Two new feature staircases link the levels of Marie-Eve Poget and Richard Jones’ end-terrace house, which has been extended outwards and upwards with dramatic effect.

While we were living in a very small studio flat in Bayswater we had been scrimping and saving to buy a larger home with its own front door, some outside space and a second bedroom,’ says Richard Jones. He and his partner, Marie-Eve Poget, were drawn to the community spirit, local amenities and attractive Victorian and Georgian houses of Brackenbury Village – a residential district of west London designated as a conservation area next to Ravenscourt Park and near the Thames.

‘To be part of a community where everyone talks to one another was important,’ he continues. ‘At first we thought the houses would be out of our price range, and were rudely rebuffed by some local agents, but we focused hard on the area and eventually found this end-of-terrace house on my birthday in February 2014.’

Richard and Marie-Eve were the only people to make an offer on the two-storey Victorian house, which was dark, damp and uninviting at the time. The ground floor was split into a front living room and a kitchen-diner, plus a single-storey WC at the rear, with two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.

‘One surveyor wrote a long, depressing report detailing all the problems and advising it would be better to demolish and rebuild,’ says Richard, who had never previously bought a property. ‘Two walls were bowing following a fire and there was damp, rot and beetle infestation. A builder friend explained that we would have to gut the building completely before making it habitable, which was quite daunting.’

Marie-Eve and Richard knew that they would need a talented architect to lead them through the potential minefield ahead. ‘I Google-stalked every architect within about a twomile radius, visiting around 100 websites,’ says Richard, ‘until an excellent local estate agent, Philip Wooller, introduced me to Sam Tisdall. We loved his portfolio; he was enthusiastic and immediately understood what we needed.’

The hipped roof of the property meant that the existing loft space was too small for a traditional conversion, but Richard was keen to use all the available space and so Tisdall devised a mezzanine-style office platform, which could also double as a guest room.

On the ground floor, the rear WC was to be demolished and replaced with a generous single-storey dining/family room extension, connected to the existing kitchen, and with glazed doors leading to the garden.

‘The design brought light into the house and gave us everything we needed in such a clever way,’ says Richard. ‘Our garden was quite small, so we wanted to conserve as much of it as possible; the extension was designed so that we would still have somewhere to sit outside. We added a pergola to create privacy and to box it off like an additional room.’

Planning permission was required for the extension and new Velux windows in the roof, which was granted in just a few weeks. Tisdall oversaw the project and introduced Marie-Eve and Richard to their building contractor, Produk. ‘The team was young, hard-working, and incredibly focused on the details,’ Richard recalls.