Notting Hill House Renovation

What the project involved

The lower ground floor was excavated first. That is the part of the work that changed what the house could do, and everything else was arranged around it.

The kitchen sits on that new level. Units are handleless and full height, the island is stone with waterfall ends carried down to the floor, and a run of glazed cabinetry is lit from inside along one wall. A rooflight is set into a dropped ceiling directly over the island, so the surface you work on is under daylight rather than under a downlight.

The dining area sits behind it and opens through bifold doors onto a raised terrace. Between the two levels is the floating glass staircase. The treads are cantilevered from the wall with nothing visible beneath them and lit from within, so the stair carries light down into the new level instead of blocking it. A solid staircase would have taken back a good part of what the excavation gained.

Upstairs the house is left as a period house. Ornate cornicing and ceiling roses are retained through the reception rooms, along with the carved marble fireplaces and a curved wall on the ground floor. The floor is wide-plank dark oak. In the snug a full-height joinery wall runs the length of the room and holds the books and the television, so the shelving reads as part of the room rather than as furniture pushed against it.

The principal bedroom keeps its marble fireplace over herringbone parquet. Beyond it the bathroom has a freestanding bath, a long vanity with an integrated basin, and a dressing corridor of fitted joinery linking the two.

At the top of the house a sliding rooflight opens onto a roof terrace with timber decking, planted troughs and seating. The stair below rises to daylight rather than to a landing.

The house was fully rewired and reheated as part of the same programme, and the exterior landscaping was carried out alongside it.

Renovating a house in Notting Hill

What Notting Hill houses are like to work on

Most of W11 is stucco-fronted terraces and Victorian townhouses, with mews houses on the smaller streets and larger properties around the garden squares. Rooms are tall, plasterwork is often original and worth keeping, and a lot of houses already have a lower ground floor that is doing very little.

That last point is why so much of the work here goes downwards. Extending outwards is usually not an option, and the space beneath the house is already partly there. Whether yours is worth digging out comes down to the existing headroom, the ground conditions and how daylight is going to reach it. Those three questions are worth answering before anything is drawn, because the answer to the third one decides most of the design.

What a house renovation costs in Notting Hill

A full renovation of a house in Notting Hill runs between £150,000 and £750,000, or roughly £2,000 to £4,000 per square metre.

Partial work costs considerably less. A single floor reworked, or a kitchen and bathrooms replaced without touching the structure, sits well below that range, and doing a house in stages is a common way to approach a period property.

What moves a project through that range:

• Digging out a basement or lower ground floor: £2,500 to £4,500 per square metre, higher than the rest of the house because of the underpinning and the waterproofing behind the finish.
• Kitchen: £35,000 to £90,000, depending on whether the units are made for the room or taken from a range.
• Bathrooms: £15,000 to £45,000 each.
• Structural work: £10,000 to £22,000 per opening to remove a load bearing wall, install steelwork and make good around it.
• Joinery: usually the largest single variable, and usually the reason a finished house reads as considered rather than assembled.
• Period fabric: rewiring, replumbing and replastering behind retained cornices and mouldings, and repairing original joinery rather than replacing it. Usually the item that surprises people.