How many times have you looked around your home and wished you had more space? An extension isn’t always the answer – sometimes you just need to make the most of what you’ve got.
Steve Jenkins is an architect whose aim in life is to help Londoners maximise their homes. He’s passionate about encouraging us to use our space more wisely. “So many people assume that, to get more room, they should stick an extension on the back of the house, but that’s not necessarily the right thing to do,” he says. Instead the first question you should ask yourself is, “Am I using all the space I already have?”
And the answer? “Probably not,” says Steve, who co-owns SJA Architects with his wife, Kate. “Sometimes the money is better spent maximising the existing space, rather than just building more. If you think about moving a few internal walls, you can squeeze in a bathroom, or perhaps a home office, or even steal a bit of a corridor to make a room wider. That’s how you make good use of an architect.”
One of Steve’s main bugbears is the classic Victorian knock-through reception room. “No-one knows what to do with that back room. It’s usually dark and narrow, or acts as a little more than a passage through to the back of the house.” He thinks that many of us have knocked down the wrong wall. Instead of having a double reception room and smaller kitchen at the back, Steve suggests keeping the front reception separate with the original entrance from the hall. This room can be a home office, playroom or television room, depending on your family’s needs. You can then open up the wall from that back reception into the kitchen, creating the larger room there.
“We’ve put our kitchen in that back reception room and it opens into a large family room at the back of the house, where you can sit and have views of the garden, rather than the street.” It’s more imaginative than simply extending at the back or a side side return extension, though Steve is by no means against this.
“I’m an architect – I love design-and-build projects. And obviously the solution above won’t work for every house, but I want to encourage people to think carefully about how to make the best of what they have already.
“Be honest with yourself about what you need and how you’re really going to use that space. So many people want enormous modern kitchens with an island in the middle, but they don’t like cooking and what they really need is a smaller cooking area near a large space, where the family can be together.”
So if you’re going to spend money on a design-and-build project, how do you go about choosing an architect?
Here are Steve’s tips:
- Communication is key. Make sure you get on with your architect. It’s your house and you have to be able to say what you want or, more importantly, if there’s something you don’t like. A good architect should be able to offer you a number of solutions. He or she should also be happy to combine different elements of the designs to come up with the best one for you.
- Be honest with the architect and yourself. It’s all very well saying you want a massive modern kitchen, but if you don’t cook, say so. The architect will be able to come up with a much better plan if he or she knows how you live.
- Think about the future. I see so many childless couples who rip down the walls because they want an open-plan, living-room layout and then they have kids and it’s a nightmare. You need some flexibility so that the house can adapt to changing circumstances.
- Make sure your architect does a really good survey. You need to know the exact measurements (I do it to the nearest 5mm.) That way you don’t get any nasty surprises later on.
- Finally, unless you’re a property developer, make sure you’re doing this for you, not the housing market. You don’t always get the money back or even make money these days. A basement conversion in Catford is worth much less than one in Wimbledon Village. Sometimes the differential between a three-bed, one-bath property and one next door with a loft conversion giving four beds and two baths, is not much more than than the £50,000 you paid for it. It’s cheaper to improve than to move, and if it enhances the way you want to live in your home, it’s worth doing.
If you have a project you’d like to discuss with Steve, leave a comment below, or contact him via SJA Architects
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