Extending your home is something you might do for a variety of reasons. Perhaps your family has grown and you need an extra bedroom, or maybe you want some additional living space, a home office, or a way to bring in more natural light. Whatever the reason, extending your home is likely to add value to the price of your property, as well as make your home a more enjoyable and comfortable place to live. In this post, we look at options for extending your home, what value it might add to your property, and some recent projects of our own that show you the types of things that can be done.
What type of extension?
Extensions tend to range from adding a few square metres to the living area, to multi-room or multi-storey additions. Extensions require planning permission so it can be a good idea to look at what other people have done in the area and consider whether your plans are reasonable and realistic in comparison. It is important to work with an architect and/or builder that is recommended, either by someone you know or through trusted registers such as that held by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). It is sensible to work with an architect who has experience of work that suits your property’s style, as well as a track record of successful planning permission applications.
Will it add value?
In London, property costs around £5,000 to £10,000 per square metre. Outside London, these figures drop to between £900 and £2,000 per square metre. You can take these figures into account when estimating how much value an extension is likely to add to the value of your property. Multiply the area gained by the local price per square metre and then offset the cost of the project against this.
Some examples
We have completed a number of residential extension projects in London. These range from single storey rear extensions, to a three-storey extension and complete internal re-configuration.
To accommodate a growing family in West Finchley (North London), 110 square metres were added to the Cissbury Ring South Garden Rooms were added to allow an open-plan area that created more fluidity between the kitchen/dining and living area, as well as a new den and study.
It can also be an option to renovate and/or extend the basement of a property, which was the case in the Stockwell Garden Room (Lambeth, North London). The house was stripped back at the lower ground level to create a more workable basement that maximised the use of natural light.
Increasing the natural light in a property was also central to the Burrows Road Glazed Envelope project (Kensal Green), in which the existing ground floor was modernised to create more open-plan living space and a bright garden room with a glass roof was added to the kitchen at the rear.
