Our home borough

Our studio is on Kensington High Street, and Kensington is where we have completed more work than anywhere else. From Victorian townhouses around Campden Hill to listed apartments and mansion flats, we know the area’s buildings, its planning officers and its contractors well. Being a few minutes away also means we can be on site whenever a project needs us.

Kensington’s homes span more than three centuries. Kensington Square was laid out in the late seventeenth century, while much of the surrounding area was built up through the Georgian and Victorian periods with stucco terraces, garden squares and large villas. Later came the red-brick mansion blocks of Kensington Court and the streets around the High Street.

Designing for Kensington’s period homes

These buildings share qualities worth keeping: generous ceiling heights, tall sash windows, cornicing, panelled doors and fine staircases. Our designs keep them and make the homes behind them work for modern family life, often by reorganising the lower ground floor around a kitchen and family room, adding a glazed rear extension, or creating a principal suite on an upper floor.

Our Kensington Townhouse project illustrates this approach: a Victorian house whose lower ground floor was substantially reconfigured, relocating the kitchen to improve its connection with the garden and introducing architectural joinery throughout.

Planning and conservation in the Royal Borough

Much of Kensington sits within conservation areas, and many properties are listed. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea takes a careful view of alterations to front elevations, roofs and rear extensions, and its basement policy limits the size and depth of new basements. We have long experience of the borough’s planning and conservation teams, and we prepare planning applications, listed building consent and the supporting heritage statements ourselves.

We plan the approvals into the programme from the start, so you know what is achievable before detailed design begins, and there are fewer surprises once an application is submitted.

Listed buildings and apartments

Listed homes need listed building consent for most internal and external changes, including works that would be routine elsewhere, such as moving partitions or replacing joinery. We survey and record the historic fabric, design alterations that respect it and explain the reasoning to the conservation officer. For apartments, we also prepare the licence to alter information that freeholders and managing agents require.

One team from design to completion

With our in-house architects, interior designers and project managers, and bespoke joinery made in our West London workshop, we take Kensington renovations from first ideas to handover without the hand-offs that usually slow projects down. During the build we act as project manager and contract administrator, so there is one point of accountability for the design, the budget and the programme.

Kensington’s mansion flats and apartments

Kensington’s mansion blocks, built mostly in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, offer generous lateral apartments with tall ceilings and fine joinery. Renovating them means working within a shared building: agreeing working hours with the managing agent, protecting common parts and coordinating services that run through the floors. We plan those constraints into the programme from the outset, and design layouts that open up kitchens and living spaces while keeping cornicing, panelled doors and parquet floors.

Buying in Kensington

If you are buying, we can visit with you before you exchange to look at the condition of the property, the likely approvals for the changes you have in mind and a sensible scope of work, so you go into the purchase with a clearer picture.

Visiting your property

Because our studio is on Kensington High Street, we can usually visit Kensington properties at short notice, including before you buy. A first visit is the quickest way to understand the building, what it is likely to need and how we would approach it.