Builders and Construction Company for West London — House Extensions, Renovation and Flat Refurbishment
West London means five councils: Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing and Hounslow. It runs from the stucco of Notting Hill and Paddington out through Hammersmith and Chiswick to the suburbs of Acton, Ealing and Hanwell. It does not include Richmond, Barnes or Putney, which are south west, and it does not include Hampstead or Belsize Park, which are north west — though you will find builders claiming all of them on the same page.
The distinction matters because those five councils behave very differently. Westminster has withdrawn permitted development for basement work across the entire city. Kensington and Chelsea applies its directions street by street and house number by house number, some served as long ago as 1969. Hammersmith and Fulham does the same, plus a borough-wide restriction on basements. Ealing leaves most of its suburbs alone but has said publicly it is considering tightening one of them. Hounslow has twenty-eight conservation areas and Article 4 on only two of them, both in Chiswick.
Within that, the date your house was built decides the work. West London went up over roughly a hundred and thirty years, moving outward as the railways reached each place — Georgian and Regency stucco first, then the Victorian terraces, then Bedford Park in 1875 as the first garden suburb built anywhere, then the Edwardian and inter-war suburbs. A house from 1840 has solid walls that need to breathe and a frontage the council is protecting. One from 1935 has a cavity, side access and a hipped roof wasting volume at the end. Different buildings, different work.
Design And Build is a construction company covering all five boroughs. Everyone the work needs is on our payroll and covered by one agreement, which means a single firm works out where you stand, draws to it, secures whatever has to be secured, and puts up the building.
What a West London Builder Has to Know Before Quoting
Which of five councils decides it
A price given before this is settled is a guess. The same rear extension is a routine job on one street and a full application with a heritage statement on the next, and the difference is not visible from the pavement.
Boundaries also run in awkward places. Chiswick sits principally in Hounslow but touches Ealing at its northern edge. Shepherds Bush and Hammersmith are one borough, Kensington and Notting Hill another, Paddington and Maida Vale a third. We confirm the determining authority against the council’s own mapping for the specific address, not the postcode, because a postcode can straddle a line.
Whether you own the building or a piece of it
Across much of west London the answer is a piece of it, and that changes who has to agree. Permitted development rights attach to houses and not to flats, so external alteration to an apartment is a planning application wherever the building stands. Beyond the council there is the lease, the freeholder or managing agent, and in some places an estate or trust with its own consent regime.
None of those substitute for one another. A scheme approved by the council and refused by the freeholder has not moved. The useful thing is to establish the full list at the start and pursue them together rather than in sequence.
What the house is made of, and when
Construction changed around the First World War and the difference is fundamental. Before it, walls were solid brick built to move moisture outward, frequently rendered in lime stucco. After it, cavity construction with wall ties and an outer leaf that keeps water out rather than letting it pass.
Treat one as the other and you cause damage. Cement repairs and modern masonry paints seal a lime-rendered wall and trap water behind it until the render fails. Ground conditions matter too — much of west London sits on London clay, which shrinks and swells seasonally and makes foundation depth a design question rather than a standard detail.
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One Construction Company Across the West London Boroughs
What we hold that four separate firms do not
Convention runs to four separate engagements: someone to design it, someone to calculate the structure, someone to deal with the neighbours and a firm to build it, all held together by the client. It works, and on the largest schemes it remains the right structure.
On most projects it leaves a join. When a tender returns above what the design assumed, or a detail sits between two appointments, the owner pays to close it. A single construction company holding the drawing, the engineering, the consents and the build removes that: one agreement, one figure, one party answerable throughout. Our architects and engineers work from the same drawings, interior design runs with the layout rather than after it, and our surveyors handle the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 where it applies.
Where a second consent comes into it
Parts of west London add a layer beyond planning. On the Ladbroke Estate in Notting Hill, sixteen communal gardens are run by their own committees, and on many of those houses the only route to the back of the building crosses one — so access has to be agreed as well as consented. In prime Kensington and across the mansion blocks of Paddington and Maida Vale, the freeholder’s licence to alter governs structural work and runs on its own timetable.
Sequencing those properly is most of the project management on a west London job. Consents pursued in parallel take weeks; the same consents taken one after another take seasons.
House Extensions in West London: Read the Date First
Georgian and Regency stucco: Paddington, Notting Hill, Kensington
The earliest west London housing is also the most controlled. Paddington and Notting Hill are stucco over solid brick, and Kensington holds some of the tightest planning control in the country — directions naming individual house numbers, several layered on the same address over five decades.
Extending outward is rarely the project here. Plots are tight, elevations are protected, and in many cases what sits behind a house is seen from a private garden just as clearly as the frontage is seen from the pavement. What works instead is reorganisation: reclaiming a lower ground floor, reuniting a divided house, or improving how the plan works within the envelope that exists.
Victorian terraces and villas: Hammersmith, Fulham, Maida Vale
The Victorian stock is where the standard west London extension happens. Hammersmith and Fulham terraces came with a slim projection at the back and a useless strip of ground alongside it, and roofing that strip over is the single change that transforms a ground floor most — a corridor kitchen becomes a room the full width of the plot with the garden untouched.
Maida Vale is different again, being largely mansion blocks and subdivided villas rather than whole houses. Shepherds Bush sits between the two, with terraces that suit both extending and converting.
1875 and the first garden suburb: Bedford Park
Straddling the Chiswick and Acton boundary, Bedford Park dates from 1875 with Norman Shaw responsible for most of the design. Its claim to being the earliest garden suburb anywhere rests not on any one house but on how much of the original scheme is still standing.
That completeness is what the Article 4 Direction protects, which is why alterations invisible to a passing visitor still need consent there. It is one of only two Article 4 areas in the whole of Hounslow — and the other, Gunnersbury, is also in Chiswick.
Edwardian and inter-war: Acton, Ealing, Hanwell
Further west the plots widen and the position eases considerably. Acton, Ealing and Hanwell hold Edwardian and inter-war stock with a way through at the side, room to park off the road, and gardens long enough to lose a few metres without noticing. A house standing alone, or attached on one side only, is permitted to reach further back than a mid-terrace.
A good deal of it falls outside any designation, which means a rear addition, a squared-off roof end and an outbuilding can each go ahead with nothing submitted to the council. If the work genuinely qualifies, ask for a lawful development certificate and the position is on record when you come to sell. What to establish before anything else is how much entitlement earlier owners consumed, because the measurement starts from the dwelling as first constructed.
House Renovation and Property Renovation Across West London
Renovating a period house that has been altered before
The recurring condition across the older stock is not disrepair but accumulated change. Five or six owners leave five or six sets of choices behind them: pipework and cabling run wherever a route presented itself, walls dropped across doorways the builder intended, and an arrangement of rooms suiting a way of living nobody here practises now.
Doing the whole property at once settles it: everything rewired and replumbed, the structure surveyed and understood ahead of any drawing, and the rooms rearranged around how the household actually lives. On a period building it is the more disruptive route and almost always the cheaper one
Home refurbishment on the suburban stock
The inter-war houses need something different. The fabric is generally sound, the plan is generally workable, and the money that matters goes behind the plaster — wiring extended by successive owners, heating specified for fewer occupants than live there now, insulation present in some places and absent in others, and a fuse board older than most of the appliances drawing off it.
Home refurbishment on these houses is worth doing while walls are already open for other work, because coming back to it later costs several times as much and nobody photographs any of it.
Flat Refurbishment and Apartment Renovation in West London
Apartment refurbishment in a prime block
A substantial part of west London housing sits inside the mansion blocks of Maida Vale, Paddington and Kensington, and a job in one of those runs to the block’s rules quite as much as to yours. Access, lift use, permitted hours, protection of common parts and the waste route are set by the block.
Whatever the block is doing arrives in your flat whether you like it or not — roof coverings, shared stacks, a heating system serving everybody. None of it is yours; all of it affects you. Noise passing between homes is what neighbours complain about, and dealing with it while the boards are lifted is comparatively cheap.
Where the lease and the freeholder decide
Nearly every flat in west London is leasehold. The lease sets the outer limit on what may be altered, and structural work or anything affecting the demise needs the freeholder’s formal consent by licence to alter — reviewed by their surveyor, at your cost, on their timetable.
Council permission is not a starting gun, and nor is the licence by itself. The two proceed separately where both are needed, and sending the freeholder’s documents over in dribs and drabs is the surest way to stretch a month into a season. We put the pack together and chase it.
Converted houses, and what the division left behind
A very large number of west London flats began as parts of a single house, carved up a generation or more back with little regard for how the building was put together. Rooms turn out to be odd shapes explained only by a partition that was never in the original plan, bathrooms end up wherever the drainage reached, and every step overhead comes through the ceiling because the standards of the day required nothing better.
Work on that kind of flat begins with how the space is organised rather than what covers it: unpicking an arrangement that was improvised rather than designed, moving the services somewhere sensible, and working out at the outset where your demise ends and the block’s responsibility begins.
Where We Work Across West London
Kensington and Chelsea — Kensington , North Kensington and Notting Hill. Westminster — Paddington and Maida Vale. Hammersmith and Fulham — Hammersmith, Fulham , Holland Road and Shepherds Bush. Ealing — Acton, Ealing and Hanwell. Hounslow — Chiswick.
Each of those pages sets out the planning position for that area specifically, including the conservation areas, any Article 4 Directions and the housing the work is actually done on.
Area We Cover
Start With Your Address and the Date
Two pieces of information settle most of what follows: where the property is, and roughly when it was built. The first tells us which council decides, whether a designation reaches you, and whether a lease or an estate has to agree. The second tells us how the building is constructed and what it will structurally accept.
The survey is free and it establishes both before any money goes into drawings. You receive the work set out in writing, a price locked to that scope, and whatever an older building may demand budgeted as a visible figure instead of hidden inside the rate.
Send us the address and we will start there.
