EXTENSION AND REMODEL
Designing a large multifunctional space for the entire family was key to Jaymeen and Neelam Patel’s extensive plans for their dated Victorian home
HOMEOWNERS Jaymeen and Neelam Patel
LOCATION Beckenham, Bromley
PROJECT Refurbishment and extension of a Victorian semi-detached villa
BUILD TIME December 2017 to March 2019
BUILD COST £384,000 (excluding kitchen and appliances)
For 12 years, Jaymeen and Neelam Patel happily lived in their three-storey Victorian semi-detached villa in Beckenham, but with a growing family, they were eventually faced with the choice of either moving house or improving and futureproofing their current home.
“We’ve always liked the house and the area, plus there’s off-street parking and good train connections,” says Jaymeen. “But for a five-bedroom Victorian house it had a small, cold and draughty kitchen. And we needed more bathrooms in the house. There were only two toilets —one on the top floor and one on the ground floor and nothing where the bedrooms are. If we were going to stay living here we knew we’d have to do some remodelling to get it up to scratch.”
MAKING PLANS
After some deliberation, the couple committed to staying put and decided to give their home amuch-needed overhaul. However, their ambitions extended far beyond ageneral upgrade. “The dream was to create amodern kitchen and living area that enabled us to entertain comfortably yet still allow people to have their own space.”
Top of the couple’s wishlist was to extend and open up the rear portion of the house, maximising the potential of the house in terms of space. “We decided that if we were going to turn our lives upside down with the drama and upheaval of creating a new extension, we wanted to make it worthwhile by creating as big and spacious an extension as we could,” says Jaymeen. “However, we also wanted to make sure that any changes were done sensitively so as not to take away from the character of the original property.”
CREATING THE BRIEF
In order to meet this challenge, the couple approached James Daykin of London-based Daykin Marshall Studio following aword-of-mouth recommendation. His overall response to the brief was to create a “grand and convivial hall for eating, entertaining and gathering ”.
“The brief was for the largest extension that would be possible at the back of the house, not just in terms of floor area but also height,” explains James. ‘The concept design for planning was based on pushing the internal volumes to their limit. Specific site conditions, such as a taller block of flats to the east, were used to negotiate a larger-than-usual footprint with the local authority. This meant that we could go up in height on one side (facing the flats) and we would s
